Scapegoats

Along with all the attempts to spin reports on Iraq, there's a repeated trend to assign blame for the failures. The 2 most frequent scapegoats appear to be Nouri al-Maliki and Iran. Our shrub would never admit that Iraq has been his failure, so he's assigning the problem to others.

Yesterday, I posted at length on how shaky al-Maliki's position is, but it's not his fault. The entire premise that Iraq would unify under a single, pro-American leader is simply ridiculous. Last months "progress" report graded al-Maliki as "not having met 18 benchmarks", but didn't address the validity of those benchmarks. These goals are America's goals for Iraq, not Iraqi's goals for Iraq. As long as Iraqi's percieve al-Maliki as an American puppet he cannot stabilize Iraq. No leader can. Anybody who becomes leader of Iraq as an American choice will fail.

The other target for repeated blame is Iran. If you believe the media, our soldiers are being killed by only 2 groups: al-Qaeda and the Iranians. While it's true that Iran is involved in Iraq (hey, they're neighbors), the Iranians have been supporting the same Shia parties that support al-Maliki. Given the long history of confrontation between America and Iran, it should come as no surprise that they oppose our occupation of their neighbor. But the Iranians are not to blame for our failed occupation.
The reason that our occupation is failing and will continue to fail is that it was begun on a fatally flawed premise: that we could turn Iraq into a pro-American client state. The reality is that the middle east has resisted foreign occupation throughout history. They will continue to resist.
This war was doomed to fail from the beginning. We will withdraw at some point, because the occupation will become unsustainable. The only question is how much blood it will take to convince our leaders to withdraw.
And those same "talkers" will blame the scapegoats. It was never the fault of the "plan".