Bush's war was such an ill-advised tangle of imperial nitwittedness, even a lull in the slaughter fails to encourage. When it's not one Hobson's choice among a raft of Catch 22s, it's another.
Remember when, according to the White House, it was al-Qaeda terrorists who posed the singular threat to peace, stability and the democratic good life in Iraq? Or, briefly, before that, the Sunni insurgents? And before that, the Shiite militias? Golly damn, if only we could purge Iraq of these sequential "bad guys," we'd soon see heaven on Earth, right there, in the original Garden of Eden.
But we, the good people of America, must first be patient, or so we were told. And patient we were, time and again, and again, and again. Because each step of the sordid way, we were told progress against the enemy du jour was being made.
Finally, with virtually the entirety of America's armed forces deployed in Iraq, we were told this is it: success, the final and indisputable victory we'd been waiting for -- all those successive bad guys were pretty much a thing of the past.
But whoops, hold on, there now seems to be a snag.
Having largely whacked the key and intransigent moles of terrorism, insurgencies and militias, "senior military commanders," reports Thomas Ricks of the Washington Post, "now portray the intransigence of Iraq's Shiite-dominated government as the key threat facing the U.S. effort in Iraq, rather than al-Qaeda terrorists, Sunni insurgents or Iranian-backed militias."
So we're back to the races, the one in which the entire, experimental and artificial and costly structure of Iraq wobbles on the edge of collapse. The promise of escalation appears in doubt -- but only to the faithless. The best advice? Be patient; be of good cheer. We'll whack this mole, too.
And who knows? We might. We've been whacking away for years, beheading one singular threat after another. The problem, of course, is that Iraq is the closest thing on Earth to a geopolitical Hydra. Whack one threat, and create two others. Whack two, and prepare for a sprawling regeneration of insufferable headaches.
From this, one would think other metaphors might occur to the powers that be, such as: When you're in a hole, stop digging. But one would be disappointed.
In Iraq, success breeds its own destruction. Hence even if we succeed in transforming Baghdad's Shiite leaders from gang to government, we'll one again succeed only in completing stage one of a two-staged failure.
It's as certain as Moktada al-Sadr's thirst for power. The deal we cut with Sunni insurgents to make the Sunni-insurgency and al-Qaeda-terrorism problems go away "makes the Shiite-led central government nervous, especially as the movement gets closer to Baghdad."
And there's not a hope in the hell that is Iraq that triumphant Shiite powers will tolerate Sunni power on an equal footing -- the very power creeping closer to Baghdad by the day.
What's more, updated concerns expressed by U.S. military officials as to what might happen merely betray what they know will happen: an "Army officer who requested anonymity said that if the Iraqi government doesn't reach out, then for former Sunni insurgents 'it's game on -- they're back to attacking again.'"
Indeed, one U.S.-friendly Sunni leader dispensed with the conditional: "As soon as we finish with al-Qaeda, we start with the Shiite extremists."
Then we're back to Square One -- only this time the starting gate will come with a preexisting price tag of trillions of dollars and 4,000 American lives.
But not to worry. The Bush administration has a plan.
Patience.
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