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From the AP, a truly baffling attempt at analyzing the Mess O’ Potamia: Only Iraqis can win the war. With an intriguing headline like that, I had to read it. I was brimming with questions: Is the AP’s military writer promoting a U.S. defeat? Which Iraqis, exactly, are capable of winning (and who are we supposed to be rooting for, again)? And how will we tell when the war’s over?

Predictably, the article neither raises nor answers any of those questions, but it’s a fine piece of creatively muddled thinking.

The harder President Bush has pushed to win in Iraq, the closer he has come to losing.

The question no longer is whether the U.S. military can fully stabilize Iraq. It cannot.

A promising enough start, if Burns didn’t go on to suggest, in the very next paragraph, that there was some sort of brief shining moment sandwiched between the toppling of Saddam and the beginning of sectarian fighting where the U.S. could have “won.” Rubbish, of course, as a passing knowledge of Iraqi politics tells us that Ba’athist dictatorship was the main factor in keeping the various factions from warring in the first place.

Now only the Iraqis can save Iraq.

They need the U.S. military’s help, no doubt. But the Bush administration has made no secret of the fact that the U.S. troop buildup in Baghdad is simply buying time for the Iraqis to sort out their differences, create a government of national unity and show they can defend themselves.

So it is not whether the U.S. can win the war. It is whether the Iraqis can, which is in great doubt.

Again, we don’t really know who “the Iraqis” are.

A digression: Commentators who follow the MSM more closely than I do have noticed a shift in the description of who the U.S. (sorry, “the Iraqi people”) are fighting against. While the sectarian fighting involves Sunnis, Shia, Ba’athists, and others, in the last few days the U.S. military command has taken to calling them all Al-Qaeda. Cute.

Since Al-Qaeda are the evildoers, and they’re Sunni, one would think that “the Iraqi people” that we’re supposed to want to win are Shia. Except, of course, that Iran is Shia, and they’re part of the Axis of Evil. We could throw our support to the secular Ba’athists, but aren’t they the ones that we went in to overthrow?

I guess Burns would like the Iraqis to “sort out their differences” and, I suppose, throw out the U.S. occupiers. When I suggest that, though, people call me a terrorist sympathizer.

Now, no article on the Iraqi clusterfuck is complete without a spot of victim-blaming:

With limited sign of progress in Baghdad, U.S. officials are asking themselves how long it makes sense to tolerate an escalating rate of U.S. casualties — at least 3,576 dead since the war began in March 2003 — while the Iraqis debate and delay.

Those Iraqis! Always debating and delaying, while our troops die (the 655,000 Iraqi dead don’t warrant a mention). If only they could just get their acts together and throw themselves into the breach, without stopping to think about it. That’s the mark of a truly decisive people. Hey, it worked for the U.S., right?

In a speech Thursday, Bush struck a notably optimistic tone about his strategy and gave no indication he was ready to give up or change approach. Yet he lowered the bar on expectations and cited Israel as a model for defining success in Iraq: a functioning democracy that nonetheless absorbs terrorist attacks.

This was the point at which I checked the URL of the article to make sure that I hadn’t accidentally landed on The Onion.

The rest of the article is just as silly, but to summarize: You broke it, you bought it. Which would make sense if the U.S. wasn’t currently engaged in stomping it into even smaller bits. Burns agonizes on how to cut and run without making it look like they’re cutting and running; the appearance of victory, or at least the appearance of non-defeat, to mask the reality of an utter failure that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Amid all the waffling is the sense I get from the whole “surge” campaign and its associated phallic imagery that these people are willing to destroy Iraq to avoid losing face. That would be bad enough if there were a way to avoid losing face, but there isn’t. Bush has already demonstrated that his manhood, while shocking and awe-inducing, is just not powerful enough to accomplish the impossible.

It’s absurd, and what’s even more insulting is the latest rhetorical strategy of placing “the Iraqi people”—you know, the ones that the Americans bombed and burned and tortured, to succeed where the Shrub failed, to somehow “win” America’s war for it.

The Bush administration broke Iraq; all but the most devout wingnuts admit this. Now it seems to think that if it steps back a little, the pieces will somehow fix themselves, and probably even be grateful. It’s the same sort of magical thinking that sent U.S. troops charging into Baghdad expecting people to toss flowers at them, and a strategy likely to meet with about as much success.