Josh Marshall observes:

Another point, and one I’m not sure is widely appreciated. The folks who brought you the Iraq War have always been weak in the knees for a really whacked-out vision of a Shi’a-US alliance in the Middle East. I used to talk to a lot of these folks before I became persona non grata. So here’s basically how the theory went and, I don’t doubt, still goes … We hate the Saudis and the Egyptians and all the rest of the standing Arab governments. But the Iraqi Shi’a were oppressed by Saddam. So they’ll like us. So we’ll set them up in control of Iraq. You might think that would empower the Iranians. But not really. The mullahs aren’t very powerful. And once the Iraqi Shi’a have a good thing going with us. The Iranians are going to want to get in on that too. So you’ll see a new government in Tehran. Plus, big parts of northern Saudi Arabia are Shi’a too. And that’s where a lot of the oil is. So they’ll probably want to break off and set up their own pro-US Shi’a state with tons of oil. So before you know it, we’ll have Iraq, Iran, and a big chunk of Saudi Arabia that is friendly to the US and has a ton of oil. And once that happens we can tell the Saudis to f$#% themselves once and for all.

Now, you might think this involves a fair amount of wishful and delusional thinking. But this was the thinking of a lot of neocons going into the war.

Of course, it goes beyond this. With a new regime in Teheran, Hezbollah was suddenly going to become impotent in Lebanon, leading to the setup of a pro-American, anti-Syrian government there. Then with its grip on Lebanon lost, Syria would be the next domino to fall. At which point, everything would be awesome.

Now that’s crazy, but pay attention to the really crazy part. Even if all of that happened what would it accomplish? This was all supposed to be part of the master plan to beat al-Qaeda, but even if the plan worked it . . . wouldn’t have done anything to damage al-Qaeda. Thank God for the grownups.

New column on the Iraq Study Group:

I never had what you would call high hopes for the Iraq Study Group, but the report, now that it’s in, is an almost physically sickening exercise in denial and evasion. The document itself comes in essentially two parts — one is a review of the situation, the second a set of recommendations for moving forward. The first part is quite good. The second is a mess, a farrago of illogic that bears no real relationship to the analysis on which it was allegedly grounded.

Read the rest!

I’ve noted this before, but the notion that the big problem in Iraq is Muqtada al-Sadr’s influence over the government and that we can solve this problem by giving Abdul Aziz al-Hakim more influence over the government instead is absurd. Recall that Muqtada came to this level of influence in the first place because we’d decided that the problem with Ibrahim Jafari’s government was its overly large dependence on . . . Abdul Aziz al-Hakim and his party. Maliki was the compromise solution to the Hakim problem. Now Hakim is the solution to the Sadr problem! And around and around we go.

From the get-go, our Iraq policy has been hobbled by an undue personalization of issues there. First killing Saddam’s sons was going to change things. Then we needed to capture Saddam. Then we were going to kill Muqtada. Then we weren’t going to kill Muqtada. Then Jafari was the problem. Now Maliki is the problem. Somewhere in between killing Zarqawi was the solution. And somehow it never occurs to anyone that there might be something about the structure of the situation that makes it impossible for the United States to achieve its goals. It’s always one more bad guy to kill, capture, or sideline.