April 2 at 7:09PM
I Can Has Preznitzy
Hey, kids!
Now you can combine all the too-obscure-for-me-to-fully-graspness of I Can Has Cheezburger with all the too-annoying-for-me-to-standness of the 2008 presidential elections…
It's Pundit Kitchen!
(While supplies last. Not available in Michigan or Florida. May cause anal leakage.)
(via CC Insider)
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And while McCain still mixes up political parties in Iraq and blithely strolls through Bagdad talking about how much better it is there, while all hell breaks loose, the Carnegie Institute for Peace
http://www.carnegieendowment.org/files/new_middle_east_final.pdf has actually put up a thoughtful, researched study on whats going on in the Middle East and what we need to do to fix things there. Here's their solution to Iraq that I bet McCain will never bother to look at, just as Bush never did seem to read anything relevant about the place.
"Finding a Way Forward for Iraq and a Way Out for the United States
The formulation of a new policy on Iraq must start from an admission that the political
process of reconciliation and state-building in Iraq is dead in the water. Since military efforts
alone cannot stabilise the country for long, as U.S. commanders in Iraq readily admit, a new
process must be put in place as soon as possible. A new political process must start not from
prescriptions for what Iraqis should do and what the country should become—that policy has
been tried already and it has failed—but from an inventory of the political players, their
goals, and their relative power and influence as they are, not as we wish they were. This inventory
would have to include all political players, including less palatable armed ones. This
would be the first step.
The second step would be to put the country’s feckless parliament and government on
notice that they are not automatically the central players in the reconciliation process. They
have been given ample time to launch a process on their own, to bring in excluded groups
and broaden their base of support, and they have failed to do so. In order to maintain a central
role, they would have to take some initiatives; otherwise other actors would become
more important.
The third step would be to bring all groups together in a kind of Iraqi loya jirga with the
help of the United Nations, other international organizations, and Iraq’s neighbors. This is a
good time to attempt again to internationalise the problem of Iraq. The United Nations has
reopened its offices, and Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, have expressed an interest
in reopening embassies in Baghdad. In general, this is a period of heightened diplomatic activity
in the region. As long as the United States does not interpret “internationalizing” to mean
pressuring other countries and international organizations to carry out and pay for policies
already formulated in Washington, the effort could succeed.
Opening a dialogue among political factions is a radical departure from past U.S. policies
toward political reconciliation, which have been based on a U.S. model of what Iraq should
look like as well as on the fiction that the only legitimate political players in Iraq are the few
that participated in the election the United States organised. These factions will resist any
attempt to bring other players into the process, as they have done all along. It must be made
clear to them that they will soon be on their own unless a broader agreement is reached,
because the United States will not continue to support them indefinitely."
This is what we should have been doing all along. And we wouldn't have to have wasted thousands of lives and billions of dollars so desparately needed at home to do it either.