Theres a lot of

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There’s a lot of buck-passing mumbo-jumbo afoot right now coming from the chief war-hawks. But I think we can already see the makings of what we might call the big buck-pass — a 21st century version of the ‘stab-in-the-back’ charge German militarists used against the fledgling republic which replaced Kaiserdom in the aftermath of World War I.

It would go something like this: To the extent that we’re facing reverses in Iraq, we’re not facing them because the plan was flawed or incompetently executed. We’re facing them because the plan was sabotaged – by its enemies at home.

The saboteurs were the folks at the State Department and the CIA who stymied effective collaboration with the pre-war Iraqi opposition and members of the defeatist press who have a) demoralized Americans by exaggerating the problems with the occupation of Iraq and b)encouraged the mix of jihadists and Baathists, by creating that demoralization, to keep up their resistance and bombing by giving them the hope that America can be run out of the country.

For my part, I doubt it’ll work. But I think that’s where we’re going.

One other point: if you have any doubt that the new neocon line that we need to turn Iraq over to the Iraqis really means turn it over to Ahmed Chalabi and the INC, read this column today by Bernard Lewis in the Wall Street Journal.

Thus reads the key graf …

Fortunately, the nucleus of such a government is already available, in the Iraqi National Congress, headed by Ahmad Chalabi. In the northern free zone during the ’90s they played a constructive role, and might at that time even have achieved the liberation of Iraq had we not failed at crucial moments to support them. Despite a continuing lack of support amounting at times to sabotage, they continue to acquit themselves well in Iraq, and there can be no reasonable doubt that of all the possible Iraqi candidates they are the best in terms alike of experience, reliability, and good will. It took years, not months, to create democracies in the former Axis countries, and this was achieved in the final analysis not by Americans but by people in those countries, with American encouragement, help and support. Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress deserve no less.

Chalabi, Chalabi, Chalabi …

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