the fix is in

It’s been in for a while. In case you had any doubts, Hitchens explains:

The summa of wisdom in [administration] circles is the need for consultation with Iraq’s immediate neighbors in Syria and Iran. Given that these two regimes have recently succeeded in destroying the other most hopeful democratic experiment in the region—the brief emergence of a self-determined Lebanon that was free of foreign occupation—and are busily engaged in promoting their own version of sectarian mayhem there, through the trusty medium of Hezbollah, it looks as if a distinctly unsentimental process is under way.

This will present few difficulties to [James] Baker, who supported the Syrian near-annexation of Lebanon.

Best line:

(You have to admit that it was clever of the president to make it appear that Rumsfeld had been fired by the electorate rather than by him.)

And a reminder that James Baker and Bush 41 are responsible for the misery of Iraq post 1991, when they refused to depose Saddam:

There would never have been a better opportunity to “address the root cause” and to remove a dictator who was a permanent menace to his subjects, his neighbors, and the world beyond. Instead, he was shamefully confirmed in power and a miserable 12-year period of sanctions helped him to enrich himself and to create the immiserated, uneducated, unemployed underclass that is now one of the “root causes” of a new social breakdown in Iraq. It seems a bit much that the man principally responsible for all this should be so pleased with himself and that he should be hailed on all sides as the very model of the statesmanship we now need.