Finally: some clear, if secular, thinking on Iraq.

It's going to be a very consistent flow of sequential problems. What the Bush administration basically did by going into Iraq was - the best rationale is really to lay the big bang on the Middle East and set that part of the world down some pathway of change.

And they certainly accomplished that. And the cynic in me says basically the worse Iraq goes, sort of, the better the big bang goes because it's more realistic that Iraq was going to go badly as opposed to well in terms of our expectations and the breakup of Iraq really forces the fights that need to occur in the Middle East now that Saddam is gone and those fights are all going to be tricky. They're going to be overlapping, and there's not going to be an obvious conclusion to it.

Instead, it's going to be a long-drawn out evolutionary process where our sense of winning or losing really hinders our sense of imagination, and in many ways, it retards the dialogue we need to have in this country about what comes next.

(HT: Northern Gleaner)