Mission Accomplished

Juan Cole has a long series of posts today about the situation in Iraq. There is a lot of important stuff there, none of it encouraging, but I picked out one excerpt that seems to capture some of the utter fecklessness of Bush's efforts there:
Let me now risk some more flack and say that given that it is two weeks before the referendum and no ordinary Iraqis have seen the text of the new constitution, and given that the Sunni Arabs reject it to a person even just from the little they know of it, this constitution is another sick joke played by the Bush administration, which keeps forcing Iraq to jump through hoops made in Washington as "milestones" and "tipping points" to which the Republican Party can point as progress. Not to mention that the draft we have all seen of the constitution is riddled with fatal contradictions ...

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