Bush's plan is a fantasy, a dangerous one which also provokes Iran to no good purpose. . . . While the Iraqis made a lot of promises and big talk, remember ONE thing. Moqtada Sadr hung Saddam Hussein. Not the government, and they had to go along. So any threat from Maliki should be taken as a threat from Kerensky to tell Lenin that Trotsky needs to control the Bolsheviks.

Imagine a U.S. state, say, Michigan, was embroiled in violence between Protestants and Catholics. Say the former were roughly 60% of the state, the latter 20%, and the rest a mix of Jewish, Muslim, and atheist people trying to avoid the bloodshed. And by bloodshed I'm talking about around 12,000 dead in the last year at least, and possibly closer to 50,000, keeping the proportions right (for reference, the actual number of murders in all of Michigan in 2005 was . . . 615). Now imagine that to solve this, we sent the NYPD into Michigan. Because that's the kind of proportionate numbers we're talking about in Iraq -- a state of 8 million being "stabilized and managed" by 37,000 people is just about the same as a nation of 30 million and a force of 140,000. Does anybody really think that the NYPD could pacify the entire state of Michigan if people who looked the same and talked the same and lived in the same neighborhoods were blowing each other up every day? Even knowing the language and having a similar culture, I think most reasonable observers would find such a proposition ridiculous.

[T]here's always the possibility that he really was upset at the sight of a former head of state essentially being lynched by his people. You can certainly understand why he'd find that a little bit unnerving.