Oooh.... blog-wrestling

Yglesias, Ezra, and Michael Tomasky all have a whack at the Iraqi withdrawal plan that doesn't exist, and won't so long as Bush is in charge. First, Matthew:

For a while over the weekend, it looked like the Bush administration stumbled into a golden ticket out of Iraq... Rather than embrace this opportunity, however, the administration worked to water down the reconciliation proposals, including the requests for the United States to withdraw.

To which Ezra responds:

For years, the sector of the left concerned with the appearance or existence of imperalist tendencies was mocked and pilloried -- remember Zell Miller foaming over hearing our troops called "occupiers" rather than "liberators"? But they were right....Folks sometimes wonder why we don't have an exit strategy. The answer, now obvious, is because we don't want one.

Tomasky responds by basically saying that the GOP will pull out of Iraq, but only in a fashion that can make the Democrats look bad. I'm pretty obviously going to side with Ezra on this one - Bush and the PNAC crew had a vision of American dominance for the eternal future, and thought Iraq was America's answer to Manchukuo.

There's a odd desire by some to try and figure out what the "motive" was behind Iraq. Was it oil? Was it Israel? What? This is really a hopeless excercise. Whatever Bush's conscious motives were are really secondary. Iraq was and continues to be an excercise in control - for the Pentagon, an attempt to demonstrate weapons superiority, for the White House, an attempt to demonstrate the will to defy all international law and convention. In one sense, the eventual victims of this hubris were irrelevant - once the US had decided to smack someone, they were going to do it, period.