The Sorcerer's Apprentice - Blaming Maliki

David Seaton's News Links
I had missed this excellent article by Justin Logan in the Examiner, maybe you did too, so I'm featuring it. It sums up very neatly most of the absurdities being shopped around by an entire establishment: government, military, intelligence, legislative branch, justice, media, think tanks, pundits, obscenely trying to escape the blame for having caused the death and mutilation of hundreds of thousands of human beings, to date, and all the countless tragedies to come. DS

Abstract - Justin Logan - Examiner: The emerging consensus on Iraq is that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is to blame for failing to produce a political outcome that would reduce the violence. In fact, Maliki is only the latest in a long string of scapegoats that the Bush administration, its supporters in Congress and pro-war pundits have used to mask the truth in Iraq: that the war was a bad idea to begin with, and that it unleashed forces we can't control.(...) remember the fate of Ibrahim al-Jaafari, Mr. Maliki's predecessor as prime minister? After U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad warned him that President Bush "doesn't want, doesn't support, doesn't accept" his leadership, Jaafari was unceremoniously dumped and replaced by Maliki. Jaafari's sin, in the eyes of the Bush administration, was his failure to stop the sectarian violence and disarm Shiite militias. Now the problems that contributed to Jaafari's downfall have been passed on to Maliki. Columnist Charles Krauthammer has argued that "the Maliki government is a failure," and the Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes chimed in to agree that "the fundamental problem is the Iraqi government." Meanwhile, Reuters has reported that the Bush administration and the Pentagon have begun pressuring Maliki to disarm Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, even though, as Reuters admits, "Maliki's political fortunes depend on the support he gets from Muqtada's group in parliament."(...) The real problem in Iraq is not Iran or Syria, it wasn't Ibrahim al-Jaafari, and it isn't Nuri al-Maliki. It isn't the case that a few external actors are undermining an otherwise sound strategy. Bush's ideology-as-strategy model is the problem.(....) If the Bush administration had properly predicted the difficulty of the mission in Iraq, it probably wouldn't have gone in the first place. As ridiculous as it now seems, the original war plan had the U.S. drawing down its military presence in Iraq to 30,000 troops by September 2003. READ IT ALL