shit or get off the pot

Yeah, yeah, yeah: I know I’m quoting the annoying Thomas Friedman ($$) Except this time he’s got a few things right.

Iraq was already pretty broken before we got there — broken, it seems, by 1,000 years of Arab-Muslim authoritarianism, three brutal decades of Sunni Baathist rule, and a crippling decade of U.N. sanctions. It was held together only by Saddam’s iron fist.

Given that reality [whose import the United States government utterly failed to grasp, not to mention plan for---my point, not Friedman's], the results we could have accomplished in Iraq were way less than the grand promises so disastrously made by the Bushies:

Had we properly occupied the country, and begun political therapy, it is possible an American iron fist could have held Iraq together long enough to put it on a new course.

Well, maybe, I say: we might have been able to do something if al Qaeda hadn’t become a factor (which Friedman mysteriously fails to mention). Now that things are such a mess, Friedman continues, we have only two options.

This has left us with two impossible choices. If we’re not ready to do what is necessary to crush the dark forces in Iraq and properly rebuild it, then we need to leave — because to just keep stumbling along as we have been makes no sense. It will only mean throwing more good lives after good lives into a deeper and deeper hole filled with more and more broken pieces.

Um, no. Whether or not the media admits it, whether or not we call the conflict a civil war, we are still fighting al Qaeda in Iraq. So Bush will not retreat—that’s what my gut tells me. We shall see.