Talk of a US-sponsored coup in Baghdad seems to be back in the air. “In other words, Nouri al-Maliki could be in trouble unless he delivers,” says the utterly ridiculous Wolf Blitzer, before asking John Burns “do you think he has the guts to go stand up against Muqtada al-Sadr and the Mahdi Army, this Shiite militia in Sadr City?” Burns, fortunately, knows what he’s talking about and says “I don’t think it’s a question of guts.” But then Burns continues:

I think one interpretation you can make of the Bush plan is that they’ve built this assumption in, that Maliki will not fulfill those pledges, he won’t meet the benchmarks and the Americans have been working desperately behind the scenes to create a kind of parallel political movement, a moderate political movement based on factions within the existing Iraqi parliament that could be used as a vehicle for a parliamentary coup against Mr. Maliki.

This strikes me as incredibly ill-advised. The saving grace of the Iraq situation has long been that Iraq has a nominally sovereign government that has any number of policy disputes with the US government. The result is a not, big, wide door for the American government to walk through where we proclaim our mission (the removal of Saddam Hussein) accomplished, shake hands with Iraq’s prime minister, and head home in an amicable manner. The more we don’t just accept US-Iraqi differences as a reason to leave, and instead choose to meddle in Iraqi affairs (note that Maliki only got into power in the first place thanks to Zalmay Khalilzad’s machinations against Ibrahim Jafari) the deeper we sink into the combined quicksands of commitment and illegitimacy.

Rod Dreher’s pretty pissed off. Jonah Goldberg does not approve:

I can’t fault Rod for his frustration with the war, though I think he comes across as pretty anti-intellectual and unfair in his tirade — as if there was no good faith or no good arguments for the positions he once held and which lots of folks he respects still hold. I should also say that the comparison to Jimmy Carter is really quite weak. Simply because Carter’s feckless foreign policy and Bush’s over confident foreign policy elicited similar feelings in Rod doesn’t mean that they can be glibly equated. Indeed, even if the result of Bush’s foreign policy has had the consequence of projecting an image of weakness around the globe as Rod asserts, that doesn’t mean they are similar foreign policies. They do come from very different impulses, I think everyone can agree.

Well that‘s certainly true. The idea, however, that at this moment in history one could still regard a Bush-Carter foreign policy comparison as unflattering to Bush is preposterous. Both arguably “projected an image of weakness.” In Carter’s case, however, at the very worst this came down to a handful of people being held hostage for a long time. Bush, by contrast, has gotten thousands of American soldiers killed, ten of thousands more maimed, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan civilians killed all in the course of wars losing multiple simultaneous wars. It’s a completely unprecedented fiasco.

UPDATE: Speaking of Carter, I do agree with Jonathan Zasloff about this. It should be noted, however, that while Carter’s Afghanistan policy looked bad, it was actually extremely effective.