An opinion piece excerpted from the Seattle Times:

George of Arabia vs. sanity
By Eugene Robinson


WASHINGTON — Don't think it's over, folks. Even though Republican senators are coming to their senses about George of Arabia's tragic war in Iraq, and even though Democrats seem to have remembered why voters put them in charge of Congress, no one should be lulled into thinking there's any guarantee that sanity will prevail.

This is the Decider we're talking about, after all.

Pay attention to what White House spokesman Tony Snow said Monday, knocking down a report that some advisers were advocating troop withdrawals: "There is no debate right now on withdrawing forces right now from Iraq."

I suppose that second "right now" in Snow's response leaves open the possibility that officials are talking about a pullout sometime in the near future. But I doubt it. Allowing himself to be forced to retreat from Iraq would ruin George W. Bush's fantasy of being seen as a latter-day Churchill. Bush keeps a bust of the British leader in his office, and has praised Churchill for being so "resolute."

Since I know he's read a book or two about his hero, hasn't Bush gotten to the part about how Churchill, T.E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell created Iraq at the fateful Cairo Conference of 1921? And how the object was to get British forces out of Mesopotamia, leave the fractious locals to their own devices and wish them the best?

"Our object and our policy is to set up an Arab government," Churchill told Parliament later that year, describing the new country he had helped design, "and to make it take the responsibility, with our aid and our guidance and with an effective measure of our support, until they are strong enough to stand alone, and so to foster the development of their independence as to permit the steady and speedy diminution of our burden."

Bush's contribution is essentially to have destroyed the Iraq that Churchill cobbled together.

In the coming weeks, as more members of Congress distance themselves from Bush's war, some will blame the failure of the U.S. occupation not on the president but on the Iraqi leadership. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his parliament, we will be told, failed to make the "tough decisions" that could have ended the sectarian civil war and allowed a pro-Western democracy to grow and flourish.

It's convenient to put it all on those disputatious Iraqis, but it's also unfair. Bush's invasion so thoroughly obliterated the apparatus of the Iraqi nation-state that the populace was left with nothing to rally around but sect, clan and ethnicity. Where else were people to turn in the midst of post-invasion chaos? How else were they to ensure that their interests were protected?

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