Oh, I get it now.

Things aren't going so well in Iraq right now, as David Brooks admits. No longer drinking the Kool Aid, he admits at longlast "The predictions people on my side made about the postwar world have not yet come true. The warnings others made about the fractious state of post-Saddam society have."

But the drive to cover the ass is never far. "To earn their own freedom, the Iraqis need a victory. And since it is too late for the Iraqis to have a victory over Saddam, it is imperative that they have a victory over us. If the future textbooks of a free Iraq get written, the toppling of Saddam will be vaguely mentioned in one clause in one sentence. But the heroic Iraqi resistance against the American occupation will be lavishly described, page after page. For us to succeed in Iraq, we have to lose."

So our inevitable pull out is actually in the interests of the Iraqis now. Interesting. I thought that most of the Iraqois want us to stay, that the insurgency is the work of "thugs and foreigners."

In any event, this isn't dave's idea. I saw this at some other blog, a left wing blog, and I scoffed then too.