Is anyone surprised that the Iraq War turned out the way that it did for the Iraqis? (We knew the Republicans would Fuck up the war; what we couldn't imagine was the grand scale on which they were able to fuck up the peace. Now we know. It's like Katrina. Except a lot worse.)

Government small enough to drown in a bathtub? Check.

Ownership society, meaning that if you've got a gun, you own whatever you've got or can take? Check.

WaPo:

In a Land Without Order, Punishment Is Power
A year or so ago, just one poster adorned Sheik Adnan Aidani's wall. It was a portrait of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq's faded but still preeminent cleric, whose stern visage glared down on visitors to the tribal sheik's house along a forest of date palms in the southern Iraqi countryside. Today, there are perhaps a dozen posters with new faces. The names blur, but together they represent the power, beyond appeal, of men with guns.

Aidani smiled, a little sheepishly, as he surveyed the posters. Gifts, he called them, the kind you don't return.

"Everyone's on his own," he explained. "These days, life is like a jungle. A rabbit doesn't survive in a jungle. Only a lion does."

"Everyone's on his own." There you go. Republican social engineering at its sociopathic finest.

And did you notice what happened to social relations?

The headline expresses it well. Je repete:

In a Land Without Order, Punishment Is Power

See, to a Republican, abuse of power is sex, or better than sex.

Abuse of power is what Republicans do; they can't help it, and we should never expect anything different from them. ("The id is political.")

So it's no wonder that Iraq turned out the way it did.

But that's nothing to what they're going to end up doing to American if they continue to retain their, erm, grip on power.