CON BLOG: I Can’t Contain Myself

May 23rd, 2006 at 01:02pm Michael Conniff 2

I finished reading “My Year In Iraq” by former Ambassador L. Paul Bremer at almost the precise moment in time when the democratic Iraqi government was instituted with all the trappings—save for the three ministry necessary to keep the country in one piece. My guess is Bremer would have been proud of his dysfunctional children in the Iraqi government, and he would have once more reiterated the need for national security above and beyond all else.

While the new leadership waxed in the Green Zone, some one hundred Iraqis are being killed every week, according to one estimate, with many of those deaths executed gangland-style. A total of 26 Americans died last week, and 23 the week before that. The Iraqi police force is a national disaster, a story of one mistake after another.

On my “Con Games” radio show Tuesday, I basically gave up—in the sense of saying there was really no way out of this mess. Later the same day I read a telling analysis in Newsweek that said the Bush Administration had moved to a policy of “containment,” not unlike the one promulgated by the old Cold Warrior George Kennan.

Remember when Bush gave speech after speech in military bases, swaddled by enlisted men, talking of “victory” in Iraq? Victory-speak is rarely heard these days: those phrases have gone the way of “support our troops” and “fight them over there so we don’t fight them over here.”

Call it “containment.” Call it what you will. As a topic of debate, Iraq is over. It’s too dusty to be a quagmire, so let’s think of it as an unending, inalterable desert where the next oasis is as illusory as the last one.

Entry Filed under: Con Games, Foreign Policy