Unqualified Offerings

Ralph Peters goes “Back to Baghdad.” It would be comedy gold but for some very ugly undercurrents. Briefly, the agenda of the column is

a) To continue to pretend Peters wasn’t full of shit when he wrote his absurd March column, “Dude, Where’s My Civil War?”

WHEN I visited Baghdad in March, there was no civil war. There is no civil war in Iraq today. But it’s beginning to look as if there might be one tomorrow.

b) To ready the Administration’s new excuse for the pending, final and undeniable failure of its grand project of bombing the Middle East free: Wasn’t us!

We can force the Iraqis to do many things, but we can’t force them to succeed. If the jealousy, corruption and partisanship in the Iraqi government prevent the country’s leaders from dealing forcefully with Iraq problems, we should no longer sacrifice our troops.

But the final and most important purpose of the column is

c) Figure out where the permanent bases are going to go:

We should be drawing up contingency plans to move a reinforced division and adequate airpower to the Kurdish provinces in the north, to withdraw the remainder of our forces to the south, and then to let Iraq’s Sunni Arabs and Shias go at it.

There you go. Mission Accomplished.

The rest of the column is covered by my inerrant Jimmy Johnson Rule: People who say their problem is that they are too nice are never, never right. (It’s not that people are never too nice, but the ones who are will never make the claim and the ones who will make the claim are never nice, let alone too nice.)