Krugman always satisfies. Today’s money quote:

The principal proponents of the “surge” are William Kristol of The Weekly Standard and Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute. Now, even if the Joint Chiefs of Staff hadn’t given the surge a thumbs down, Mr. Kristol’s track record should have been reason enough to ignore his advice. For example, early in the war, Mr. Kristol dismissed as “pop sociology” warnings that there would be conflict between Sunnis and Shiites and that the Shiites might try to create an Islamic fundamentalist state. He assured National Public Radio listeners that “Iraq’s always been very secular.”

But Mr. Kristol and Mr. Kagan appealed to Mr. Bush’s ego, suggesting that he might yet be able to rescue his signature war. And am I the only person to notice that after all the Oedipal innuendo surrounding the Iraq Study Group — Daddy’s men coming in to fix Junior’s mess, etc. — Mr. Bush turned for advice to two other sons of famous and more successful fathers?

Not that Mr. Bush rejects all advice from elder statesmen. We now know that he has been talking to Henry Kissinger. But Mr. Kissinger is a kindred spirit. In remarks published after his death, Gerald Ford said of his secretary of state, “Henry in his mind never made a mistake, so whatever policies there were that he implemented, in retrospect he would defend.”

Oh, and Senator John McCain, the first major political figure to advocate a surge, is another man who can’t admit mistakes. Mr. McCain now says that he always knew that the conflict was “probably going to be long and hard and tough” — but back in 2002, before the Senate voted on the resolution authorizing the use of force, he declared that a war with Iraq would be “fairly easy.”

Mr. Bush is expected to announce his plan for escalation in the next few days. According to the BBC, the theme of his speech will be “sacrifice.” But sacrifice for what? Not for the national interest, which would be best served by withdrawing before the strain of the war breaks our ground forces. No, Iraq has become a quagmire of the vanities — a place where America is spending blood and treasure to protect the egos of men who won’t admit that they were wrong.

It would be really, truly sad if this is the prime reason the war won’t end until Chimpy is forcibly removed from office. I mean, we all fight with our parents sometimes, but I try not to drag all my friends and neighbors into those petty, passing moments. I guess my ego isn’t quite so delicate as Shrub’s.

And just because it’s always good to remember the extent of the qWagmire, here’s a little walk down memory lane:

The CPA official in charge of the Iraqi stock exchange conjured up fancy ideals of computerization and new securities laws when the need was for blackboards. In the words of one Iraqi broker peeved at the non-practicality of it all, “Those CPA people reminded me of Lawrence of Arabia.” (p 232)

The CPA’s public relations office “never conceded a mistake and spun failures into successes to the point of absurdity”. (p 129) It ran the new Iraqi Media Network as a crude propaganda tool with the logic that “we’re paying for it, so we can decide what airs”. (p 134)

Chandrasekaran delves into the murky world of fraudulent private security contractors who were subcontracted by the CPA in Iraq and earn inflated profits using false invoices. Some of them collected weapons seized by the US military and shipped materiel out of Iraq for sale. The weaponry they possessed and used was legally verboten. “They were above the laws of war.” (p 146)

Throughout his stint in Iraq, Bremer insisted that power shortages would end soon, but it never happened. Prewar US statements hid the enormity of Iraq’s infrastructure failure by positing that oil revenues could finance reconstruction. Until the Green Zone itself began to be hit by insurgent attacks, the CPA dished out the myth that “the country was becoming safer by the day”, discrediting itself as an entity wallowing in make-believe. (p 179)

Iraq’s health-care resuscitation was in the hands of James Haveman, who wasted previous resources on an anti-smoking campaign instead of raising awareness on preventing childhood diarrhea and fatal maladies. According to one American pharmacist, “Haveman and his advisers really didn’t know what they were doing and viewed Iraq as Michigan after a huge attack.” (p 216) The CPA’s health measures were evaluated by the Iraqi minister of health as “a fool’s errand”. (p 219) The pity was that men like Haveman were untouchable by virtue of their ties to the Bush administration.

The Pentagon and the CPA were blind to the dangers posed by disaffected Iraqi nuclear scientists after the fall of Saddam and treated the matter as part of the de-Ba’athification purges. Parallel State Department attempts gently to reorient the scientists were blockaded in Iraq by fellow Americans. The Central Intelligence Agency’s Iraq Survey Group searching for elusive weapons of mass destruction even threatened Americans aiming to achieve a soft landing for the scientists. One American general commented, “The CPA’s missteps cost us one very valuable year.” (p 289)

CPA officials assumed that change could be brought about simply by drafting laws, as it happens in the US. Bremer learned very late in the day that conceiving an inanity “in Washington and ramming it down the throats of Iraqis didn’t work”. (p 41) United Nations envoy Lakhdar Brahimi’s assistant told Chandrasekaran that “the story of the Americans in Iraq is of missed opportunities”. (p 246) One pensive CPA member recalled after Iraq was “handed over” to an interim government, “We were so busy trying to build a Jeffersonian democracy and a capitalist economy that we neglected the big picture.” (p 276)

Chandrasekaran perorates his remarkable book of discoveries with the reality-check that Iraq did not require “a full-scale occupation with imperial Americans cloistered in a palace of the tyrant”. (p 290) One is left wondering whether there was a method in the madness and if the chaos that the CPA’s ineptness bequeathed to Iraq was intentional. This book goes a long way in shattering the belief that the US is a benign hegemon resurrecting broken countries with finesse. That Americans can be blunderbusses despite the brouhaha is being borne out by the unspeakable human tragedy of Iraq.

I hope Democrats can remember these simple, encapsulating moments in our recent history. The bottom line: cronies and incompetent political hacks are responsible for almost every individual part in the overall Mess O’Potamia. These sorts of folks can’t admit their own error, don’t perceive those aspects of the world they don’t like or concur with, and will generally fold like fresh laundary before stern, questioning, fully empowered authority. You know, like Congress. Get these idiots, and Kristol and every other enabler of the War for Chimpy’s Ego up on stage, stat.