The imbecilic mess that President Bush has made in the Middle East still shows signs that its creator hasn't yet reached his Platonic Ideal of imbecility. There always seems to be one more dram of halfwittedness he hasn't yet thought of adding to the grim cauldron, but in time, it comes to him.
Just when we think he's played out, that he couldn't possibly make things worse, the Commander Guy somehow manages to seize the merely hopeless and then thrash it into the vastly and recklessly hopeless.
The president's latest strategic novelty, as the Washington Post reports this morning, is to assist in opening a new front in Iraq.
No, you read that right. Quoting the Post: "The United States is providing Turkey with real-time intelligence that has helped the Turkish military target a series of attacks this month against Kurdish separatists holed up in northern Iraq, including a large airstrike on Sunday, according to Pentagon officials."
Yes, the one development that has been dreaded since we liberated Iraq to a path of internal carnage and demolition, we are now aiding and abetting. Iraqi Kurds -- our only friends in that Bedlam of distrust -- are, of course, sputtering with rage and deadly accurate accusations of betrayal.
But naturally they don't soar to the rarefied heights of complex strategic thinking that our boys do. To wit ...
"[The Turks] said, 'We want to do something.' We said, 'Okay, it's your decision,'" explained a U.S. military official.
I have often aspired to that level of thoughtful articulation on matters of global complexity, as I'm sure you have. But gosh darn it, I just don't have the verbal facility to run with the big dogs in their sorting out of geopolitical intricacies.
Bush's newest warring front and latest big adventure comes at a time when the Post also reports that he's "facing new pressure from the U.S. military to accelerate a troop drawdown in Iraq and bulk up force levels in Afghanistan." Why's that? Because the latter is disintegrating even faster than the former, although the former is still primed to blow at any minute.
After six years of Bush's guidance, the once-backward and terrorist-harboring nation of Afghanistan has now advanced to "grinding poverty, rampant corruption, poor infrastructure" and virtual rule once again under the terrorist-harboring Taliban -- all of which, as the Post diplomatically puts it, are "hindering" Bush's grand design.
This development is ... ah ... unwanted by Bush, and "senior administration officials now believe Afghanistan may pose a greater longer-term challenge than Iraq." But those officials may be overlooking their boss's latest efforts at evening the score by blowing up northern Iraq. Remember, no situation is ever so bad it can't be made worse by utterly unschooled grit and determination.
So Bush is at a crossroads, and these days, he's thinking legacy. His next and inexorably halfwitted strategic move will, he knows, "influence his ability to pass on to his successor stable situations in both countries, an objective his advisers describe as one of the president's paramount goals for his final year in office."
Well, that could be problematic.
At this point I would not entirely facetiously advise Mr. Bush to pull a Seinfeldian George Costanza -- you know, the episode in which George, the self-described "Lord of the Idiots," realizes that every instinct he's ever had has resulted in unmitigated catastrophe, so he resolves to simply do the opposite of each instinct in the future. Alas, things then work wonderfully well for him, and others by association.
So to the other George I'd say, drop all your interventionist instincts and simply rework that exquisitely simple advice of the high-ranking military official quoted above. From this day on, George, when Middle Eastern high-muck-a-mucks say, "We want to do something," then you say, "Okay, it's your decision." But we're outta here.
It couldn't make matters any worse, George, and from it there might even flower the Costanza Effect -- that Platonic Ideal of, for a change, serendipitous imbecility.