. . . then I can get my blood pressure raised by reading Charles Krauthammer. It’s astounding stuff. First off, he explains that idealistic rhetoric has just been a smokescreen for an agenda of regional hegemony (someone tell George Packer): “We are instead trying to sustain fragile democracies in three strategically important countries — Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon — that form the geographic parentheses around the principal threat to Western interests in the region, the Syria-Iran axis.”

Is it an axis of . . . evil? Nevermind.

Next comes the key phrase, the mind-blowingly obvious error that lurks at the heart of the project. “We are trying to bring democracy to Iraq in particular because a pro-Western government enjoying legitimacy and popular support would have been the most enduring means of securing our interests there.” Now ask yourself, what does the fact that a pro-western, popular, and legitimate government in Baghdad would serve our interests have to do with the logic of toppling Saddam and then holding an election? It also makes sense if you simply assume — for no reason at all — that an election will bring to power a government eager to support America’s regional strategic ambitions. The upshot? “We should nonetheless make a last effort to change the composition of the government and assemble a new one composed of those — Kurds, moderate Sunnis, secular Shiites and some of the religious Shiites — who might be capable of reaching a grand political settlement.”

You see! We invaded Iraq to build a democracy, but the Iraqis ruined it by voting the wrong way, so we can fix things by dictating to them the terms of a more appropriate parliamentary coalition. After that perhaps we can unleash Chiang!

Via GFR, James Fallows on why it’s time for us to go. Leaving, he says, will likely lead to very bad events. But “If it is not in our power to prevent these disasters, then it is better to do as little extra damage to ourselves as possible before they occur.” And it isn’t in our power.

So the choice is between a terrible decision and one that is even worse. The terrible decision is just to begin leaving, knowing that even more innocent civilians will be killed and that we’ll be dealing with agitation out of Iraq for years to come. The worse decision would be to wait another year, or two, or three and then take that terrible course. If we thought a longer commitment and presence would lead to a better outcome, then the extra commitment might be sensible. But nothing occurring in Iraq in the last year has given rise to any hope that things are getting better rather than worse. (This, by the way, is the reason I have changed my mind: the absence of evidence that the chances for a “decent” departure will improve.)

Right. The trendlines are vital here. Staying would make sense if there were any reason to think staying longer would create the conditions for departing in the future under less screwed-up circumstances. All the evidence, however, is the reverse. Things are worse on 1 December 2006 than they were one year ago, worse than they were two years ago, worse than they were three years ago, and there’s no reason to think that pattern is going to change.

Coming soon to a US Iraq policy near you?

What we’re seeing here is the “perverse desire to win” of musical fame. Insofar as you want to obtain “victory” in Iraq, it becomes necessary not to devise a strategy to accomplish our goals, which can’t be done, but rather to define a set of goals such that they can be accomplished. Hence the appeal of an “80 percent strategy,” a.k.a. James Kurth’s “Crush the Sunnis” plan. But even if we could make this “work” (which is at least possible though, I would argue, actually pretty unlikely) what would we thereby achieve? Certainly not the Iraqi model of pre-war dreams. Indeed, it seems to me that in this case more rubble would bring more trouble, as the cross-national Sunni Arab majority comes to agree with Osama bin Laden that the United States is waging vicious war against them and theirs and that every good Muslim’s duty is to fight back.

Jim Henley hints at a small item from the “what were they thinking” file, the apparent fact that a big assemblage of neoconnish intellectuals that framed the political objectives of the Iraq campaign before the war was named “Bletcheley II.” Here’s Woodward o the subject:

And Wolfowitz got — right after 9/11 set up this thing called – Bletchley II. Do you remember that? Chris DeMuth at the AEI — And they wrote a paper, seven pages, called, “The Delta of Terrorism,” meaning the origin of terrorism, and it essentially said we are in a two-generation war with radical Islam, and we have to do something, and we better start with Iraq.

Now why would you call it that? The reference is to the Bletchley Park group during World War II, but they were breaking codes, not dreaming up asinine grand strategies. And, for that matter, if you’d just written an analysis of the origin of terrorism, why would’t you title it “The Origin of Terrorism?” Doesn’t “delta” mean “change?” In some ways, I think this artless combination of pretension and ignorance nicely sums the whole Iraq venture up.