Only the heir to the kingdom of idiots

I'm beginning to think the current president's "new" plan for Iraq is to escalate the war by taking on Iran and Syria...

Londo Mollari once said "Only an idiot fights a war on two fronts. Only the heir to the kingdom of idiots would fight a war on twelve fronts." Now granted, this is only four fronts, but still.

It looks like we've started ramping up. Anecdotal evidence says troops are training their guns across the border. Real evidence says we've started capturing Iranians inside Iraq - diplomats - and flying across Iranian airspace. And lots of people think that Iraq was meant as a show of power to intimidate the Iranians.

And we have to intimidate them. We've never been able to keep our hands off that country since the Shah fell. And after all, we can't let them have nukes. Only Israel is allowed to have nukes in the Mid-East... And if they do get nukes, we'll have to treat them like North Korea instead of Iraq... So we'd better do whatever we're gonna do fast, right?

So the "new plan" is to ignore the Iraq Study Group report and, instead, "surge" troops into Iraq. We stretch the army thinner, we take troops out of Afghanistan (remember Afghanistan?), we bump heads with al-Maliki over Shi'ite militias ... and in some way this helps us "win".

A couple of points from The Guardian, Jan 12:

Tony Blair yesterday welcomed the decision to send more troops to Iraq, saying it "makes sense", but reaction otherwise was overwhelmingly negative.

Good old Tony. W can always count on him. Well, kinda:

The British government said President Bush's announcement would not affect its own plans to hand over authority in southern Iraq to Iraqi forces and pull out British troops this year, but Mr Blair claimed the divergent plans did not represent a US-UK rift over policy. "It is really important that we don't either give that impression or have that misunderstanding," the prime minister told West Country TV in Plymouth.

Yes. There's no "rift" over policy. The Brits are just no longer willing to die for American hegemony and cheap oil, especially since they don't get cheap gas.

I remember quite vividly an English friend's comment, while visiting the US back in 2002: How are you supposed to take conservation and cutting back on oil seriously, she demanded, when it's so cheap?

And rather than taxing gas a bit to support his Mid-Eastern venture, Bush tries everything he can think of to get the price down, even wanting to destroy the ANWR to get at more. Oil is behind it, oil and enriching his cronies, but he knows Americans aren't really in favor of the infamous "blood for oil" trade-off.

As for the rest of the world, well, it's Condi to the rescue:

Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, is to fly to the Middle East today to try to win support for the plan from allied Arab governments, though the immediate reaction in the region reflected the widespread scepticism in America.

That's great. Condi has been so effective in the past at winning over Arab governments. I'll bet she'll tell them that al-Maliki is begging for us to implement this plan. She just needs to make sure she keeps an eye on those mikes:

The Bush administration was at pains to stress the initiative had come from the Iraqi government, led by Nouri al-Maliki. But Ms Rice, in an unguarded moment, picked up on an open television microphone yesterday morning, expressed concern that her forthcoming visit to Iraq might be perceived as dictation of policy from Washington. "I don't want to descend on the Maliki government and look like we, you know, just sort of beat their brains out," she said.

After all, we're still pretending that this is some sort of joint thing, aren't we? That the al-Maliki government is legitimate, and popular, and representative, and wants us. Well, wants us - al-Maliki wants us, all right; that is, he wants US troops there doing his bidding, backing off from hunting al-Sadr, and going where he sends them. And although Bush promised to revoke the Clinton policy of putting US troops under "foreign" command (read, for Clinton, UN), he hasn't. In fact, he's put US troops under UK command in his pursuit of his own goals. But Iraqi command? While Bush's base has remained strangely quiet on this point so far, I think that might push them too far. So the White House has to pretend it's not going to happen.

But here's a real kicker:

The US defence secretary, Robert Gates, stressed that the new deployment may not, as had been widely believed, be short term. "It's viewed as a temporary surge, but I think no one has a really clear idea of how long that might be," Mr Gates said.

Not short term. That's most likely the most important - and most depressing - sentence in the whole thing. Especially when coupled with this:

There was concern in many Middle East capitals at the apparent threat of escalating the conflict to include Iran and Syria. Mr Bush, in his speech, warned that the US would "seek out and destroy networks" of insurgents moving into Iraq or based in these neighbouring countries. While US commanders insisted yesterday that this did not signal an intention to go into Iran or Syria, Ms Rice confirmed that all options were open.

All options are open. That sounds a lot like "all options are on the table." And we know where that led us, don't we?

---
note: I started writing this on Jan 12. Since then, I see I'm not the only one to whom Londo's words occurred in this context. But honestly, they occurred to me independently. Some things are just too apt to ignore.