Vainly Naming - The logic of the Iraq situation is terrible. I've opined on this many times before. It will take nothing less than a Terror to change Iraqi culture. But Americans won't injure, kill, and torture anyone except official combatants. That's all to our credit, but it means we cannot control Iraq.

Jim Henley gets heated thinking about how the situation in Iraq is fraying:

God damn the men who put our troops in this situation. God damn the men who brought our country to this pass. God damn Cheney and Rumsfeld and their cadre of little geniuses. God damn the media poodles who obligingly spun the way they were spun. God damn Colin Powell for the narcissistic lie he told himself about how he was needed "inside the system" when he had the chance to blow it all open by publically resigning. God damn George W. Bush for accepting the advice of knaves and dreamers. God damn Tony Blair and the Third Way messianism that sees war as the engine of human progress, damn the cowardly Democrats in Congress for confusing their short-term political viability with the welfare of the country and damn the freelance cheerleaders, with blogs or syndicated columns, who imagined that their September 11-induced post-traumatic stress disorder was clarity and toughness rather than hysteria. Damn every Annie Hall with a keyboard demanding that Woody Allen come over and kill the spider now, and not just the one in her apartment but every spider on earth, dammit, because someday, someday, one of them just might bite her. God damn every fool who decided to support the war just because the protesters were icky.

Most of all, god damn you if you promise that if we just knock over Iran now, or Syria, or whoever, that all the old lies will come true. God damn your smug, cowardly little souls to hell.

Ouch. That's a lot more heat than seems appropriate this early in the game. On the other hand, if events do spin out of control they way I think they will, Jim will be very well positioned to hand out I-told-you-sos and complementary plates of crow.