David Brooks versus Winston Wolf

David Brooks:

But before long, the more honest among the surge opponents will concede that Bush, that supposed dolt, actually got one right. Some brave souls might even concede that if the U.S. had withdrawn in the depths of the chaos, the world would be in worse shape today.

Winston Wolf:

Well, let’s not start suckin’ each other’s dicks quite yet. Phase one is complete, clean the car, which moves us right along to phase two, clean you two.

Reading Brooks’ column today, it’s clear that (put into The Wolf’s terms) he’s disregarded the advice of The Wolf and gone straight to sucking Bush and every other surge enthusiast’s dick. Phase one is complete — we’re now down to hundreds of political murders each month, instead of 2-3 thousand — but Iraq remains a patchwork of tribal, sectarian and ethnic divisions which the weak central government (from which Juan Cole reports another coalition party has withdrawn) remains unable to reconcile. The reduction of violence in Anbar has been accomplished by arming and paying former Sunni insurgents who have no fealty to the Shiite government in Baghdad. And never mind that the reduction in violence has been achieved in part due to the completion of ethnic cleansing which has resulted in 2.5 million internally displaced refugees, and a series of truces and ceasefires which periodically threaten to dissolve into more fratricidal violence on a massive scale. Pay no attention to the central government we are backing in Baghdad canoodling with Iran’s leadership and Iran exerting increasing influence in Iraq, by giving and withholding support for the various Iraqi Shiite factions, despite our emphasis on excluding Iran from Iraq’s power structure.

So here we are, with more troops in Iraq than we had pre-surge, negotiating an agreement to expand our presence from 30 to 58 bases on a indefinite basis, with no clear plan or clear path to ending our commitment in American lives and treasure in the foreseeable future.

Bush and Brooks are standing like Jules and Vincent, drenched in Marvin’s blood and brains, still without a plan that will get the car and Marvin out of sight and their own sorry asses cleaned up — or our troops out of Iraq in the next 10 years. Phase II or Phase III?? They’re too busy congratulating each other — not how The Wolf put it — to bother with that. . .

MORE: Right Blogostan is having an orgy of fellatial self-congratulation, but at least one conservative isn’t buying it. At the same time, a GAO report sheds more light on the administration’s ongoing political failures in Iraq:

While agreeing with the administration that violence has decreased sharply, a report released yesterday by the Government Accountability Office concluded that many other goals Bush outlined a year and a half ago in the “New Way Forward” strategy remain unmet.

The report, after a bleak GAO assessment last summer, cited little improvement in the ability of the Iraqi security forces to act independently of the U.S. military, and noted that key legislation passed by the Iraqi parliament had not been implemented while other crucial laws had not been passed. The report also judged that key Iraqi ministries spent less of their allocated budgets last year than in previous years, and said that oil and electricity production had repeatedly not met U.S. targets.