Dave Weigel has a neat op-ed in The LA Times on the American right’s new dystopian literature:

Two years from now, terrorists under the banner of the “Progressive Restoration” will take over Manhattan in a larger attempt to overthrow the government. Thirteen years later, President Chelsea Clinton and Vice President Michael Moore will haul out the good White House china for Osama bin Laden’s state visit. By fiddling with your radio, you may be able to catch an underground broadcast by Sean Hannity. If you own a radio, that is; folks living in states that are under Sharia law won’t even be that lucky.

These aren’t my fantasies or nightmares. All of these vignettes are ripped from science fiction thrillers that have hit shelves in just the last 18 months. Sharia comes to the United States in Robert Ferrigno’s potboiler, “Prayers for the Assassin.” In Joel C. Rosenberg’s “Last Jihad” trilogy, a steel-spined U.S. president nukes Baghdad, then combats a Russo-Iranian axis, all in fulfillment of Scripture (or so we’re told in the nail-biting third book, “The Ezekiel Option”). Hannity and his stone-jawed sidekick, G. Gordon Liddy, battle the Clinton restoration in Mike Mackey and Donny Lin’s comic book, “Liberality for All.” The Second American Civil War is breaking out in Orson Scott Card’s “Empire” (book out now, video game on the way).

Dave regards this as sillly and implausible. Glenn Reynolds sticks up for silly implausibility and explains that “Dystopias — like utopias — are there to make a point, not a prediction.” I actually have a ton to say about this but the post keeps getting too long.

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Chatham House report concludes that “The root failure (of Blair’s foreign policy) has been the inability to influence the Bush administration in any significant way despite the sacrifice — military, political and financial — that the United Kingdom has made” and that “Tony Blair has learned the hard way that loyalty in international politics counts for very little.”

Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett calls this “ridiculously wrong” but, obviously, it’s perfectly true. It’s particularly sad because, as I’ve said before, Blair was really near the top of the pyramid in terms of people whose combination of objective authority and apparent credibility were key to persuading people to back the war. Obviously, neither Blair nor Colin Powell could have actually prevented the war, were Bush sufficiently determined to launch it, but without their backing it would have been a much more politically problematic enterprise.

“The rethinking of U.S. Iraq policy represented by the Baker-Hamilton report is an important and welcome start but insufficiently radical if Iraq’s collapse and an unprecedented regional war are to be avoided,” writes the International Crisis Group by way of introducing their report on the situation. I concur. The White House, meanwhile, believes that Baker-Hamilton goes too far. They believe that things are basically fine in Iraq. The improvement that needs to be made, says the White House, is that we should send the new rotation of troops into Iraq on schedule. Those troops are supposed to relieve troops who are already there. Which is where the White House plan comes in . . . if the troops who are supposed to get relieved just . . . stay in Iraq for a while, then — like magic! — we have more troops in Iraq.

This is the “surge” option that, apparently, the Joint Chiefs of Staff oppose on the grounds that the White House has no particular mission in mind for the surged troops and is just looking for a policy that sounds good while remaining committed to an open-ended occupation of Iraq.

If you were thinking to yourself, “you know what the world needs? more nuclear proliferation” then you’ve got to like this nuclear deal the Bush administration signed with India. If you think the USA really ought to clarify that the NPT is a dead letter, and that foreign countries shouldn’t bother supporting our position on Iran since we pursue these things with no sense of principles or seriousness of purpose, the you ought to really love the deal.

You can read more here from Daryl Kimball and Joseph Cirincione, or just watch the video of Joe laying out the case above. One thing to note here is the rise of USINPAC as an influential actor in congress.

To expand a bit on Atrios’ latest ISG remarks, the gigantic gaping black hole of error into which the ISG seems to have stumbled is the belief that George W. Bush and his key aides had some kind of secret desire to implement a reasonable Middle East policy and were merely backed into a corner by some unfortunately misguided past statements. I couldn’t really say why they thought that, but they obviously did and belief in such things is weirdly widespread. Earlier today I heard someone float the notion that the White House had spiked an op-ed calling for a grand bargain with Iran because they were busy conducting “quiet diplomacy” aimed at . . . a grand bargain with Iran. Well, if you believe that I have a bridge you may be interested in buying.

It’s hard for some folks to believe, but Bush in his own goofy way clearly believes roughly what he says about Iraq. That to lose the war would be a disaster and that to leave Iraq is to lose the war. That, somehow, a perpetual US military presence there will create a democracy. That we must never negotiate with evil. He’s been president a long time now and these ideas are guiding his thinking and will continue to do so unless he’s forced to make changes. He doesn’t need “political cover” to do something knew, he needs to be made to do it.