Ongoing Incoming

Pat Lang:

Folks, it undoubtedly is the hope, plan and aspiration of well meaning people that pressure and adult advice will cause the Decider to decide differently, but that is a futile hope. People who think that junior will change his position or that he can be prevented from following his present course mistake him and need to study the Constitution.

Unless some catastrophe intervenes, two years from now we will still be fighting in Iraq with much the same number of forces, and by then decline will have set in at home and abroad in ways that can only be hinted at now.

People in the Washington/New York establishment act and talk as though the Iraq problem is an American political problem and that the Iraqis and other Muslims are acted upon rather than being actors in the drama. McCain said today on MTP that al-Maliki " has to understand," and that he "has to" to do this or that. Well, in fact al-Maliki is just one of the players in the ethnic, factional and sectarian struggle for Iraq, and lacks both the power or the will to do anything except work toward the Shia domination of as much of Iraq as the Shia can hang on to. Bartlett referred today on FNS to the "sovereign government of Iraq." Well, they may be sovereign, but they are not the sovereign government of Iraq.