"Neocon Hangover, Part III"

The Washington Post's editorially bored:

The resumption of sectarian war in Iraq alongside that of Syria would be devastating for the Middle East--and for the interests of the United States. The fragile gains of the Iraq war ... would be wiped out, and committed U.S. enemies such as al-Qaeda and Hezbollah would surge. The situation demands, as [former ambassador Ryan] Crocker put it, “a sustained, high-level diplomatic effort by the United States” in Iraq. But it also makes intervention aimed at ending the war in Syria that much more urgent.

 

Such is the neocon's hamster wheel. Absent wider intervention in the region--rendered more volatile by our initial intervention in the region--our "fragile gains" may be "wiped out," though the gains were always illusory, never fragile. But let's pretend an Iraqi fragility that's susceptible to the soft persuasion of diplomatic intervention--remember, our gains were regrettably fragile, but real--whose success now hinges on what seems a strong suggestion of military intervention in Syria, which is how we began in Iraq, which promised to infectiously detonate a kind of Jeffersonian Star Trek "Genesis" across the tumultuous Middle East.

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