Throughout the life of this blog, I have made intermittent yet persistent sport of Timesman Ross Douthat, to the point, on several occasions, of referring to him as “Ross Dumb Fuck.” Well, perhaps I haven’t matured, but Ross has, recently turning in a stunner of a column in which he admitted, as a Republican, that he would rather see Iraq “fail” (disintegrate into several ethnic and/or sectarian fragments) than see the U.S. expend further blood and treasure in the attempt to hold the pieces together.
Conveniently enough, Ross finds excellent cover for this heresy provided by two usually more hawkish than Ross conservatives, David Frum and Jeffrey Goldberg, who point out that the “countries” of the Middle East were cobbled together by France and Great Britain out of the corpse of the Ottoman Empire, with very little concern for the wishes (often violently contradictory) of the actual populations involved. When we consider that Great Britain itself fissioned in the twentieth century, with the violent departure of Ireland in the 1920s, and that it may fission again in the 2010s, with the peaceful departure of Scotland, it’s not that surprising that similar disruptions might occur in the Middle East as well.*
There’s also loose talk among the Frum-Goldberg-Douthat axis that the U.S. might be able to work out a pretty sweet deal with Iran—yes, you heard me, with the Great Satan of Nations—to bring some sort of order out of all this redrawing of boundaries—poetic justice indeed, since it was Frum himself who coined the absurd “Axis of Evil” trope linking Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as the Kings of Terror, when none of the three had anything to do with 9/11 or each other. I’m liking the new axis a lot more than the old. Chew on that, Dick Cheney.
*After World War II, France claimed that Algeria was part of “metropolitan France”—among other things, Algerians sent deputies to the National Assembly—so it’s hardly unreasonable to argue that France also fissioned in recent memory.
