I stopped reading at this point, Brendan, because what’s the point continuing when your fellow commenters just make it up as they go along?

You simpy cannot adduce such an “assumption” – mysterious or otherwise – based on anything I wrote. Take another look.

For the record, I very much doubt the plight of the Kurds or Marsh Arabs kept GWB awake at night. It hardly puts him in a club of one if this is true…and I suspect it is…but I didn’t need to believe this was a war motivated by Washington’s altruism in order to support it. The same goes for virtually every self-describing “leftist” who supported the war. People like Vaclav Havel, Jose Ramos-Horta, Adam Michnik and George Konrad, for example.

Well don’t feel like the Lone Ranger. In one of his increasingly frequent ‘bizarre lectures on life, the universe and everything’ our Glorious Leader ‘Mr Tony’ recently revealed that he had never heard of Sykes-Picot (!!).

However, although he knows nothing about the Middle East, he has manage to master the art of boring people senseless with his incoherent ramblings:
‘What began an earnest question and answer session on Middle East politics turned into a philosophical discussion which left those present scratching their heads.’

Or maybe they were too confused to be bored: who knows?

However, perhaps the ‘theories of Mr Tony’ will become an important research topic in 21st century political science.

Kagan also explicitly states that U.S. forces should focus their efforts in the Sunni and mixed Sunni-Shiite areas of Baghdad, the source of most sectarian fighting. He ignores the internecine fights among the Shiite militias. Is this intentional? Is he tacitly proposing—as Vice President Dick Cheney seems to be doing these days—that the United States take the Shiite side in the Iraqi civil war? If so, his briefing’s advocates should make this clear, so the audiences know what they’re getting into. If not, and we have to go clear, say, Sadr City too, do we need still more troops?

Interesting chart linked in this piece: DOD report on average weekly attacks.

On the other hand, if I had known that it would turn out this bad even with a US invasion, I probably would not have supported the war. No sense bringing about a marginally milder conflagration than the one you are trying to avoid.

And if it’s somehow not clear, I don’t really know anything about Iraq either, except what I read in the newspaper.

And behind the Saudis stands…..

It is important to realize that the Saudis bear a great deal of blame for having encouraged the flow of money into Iraq for the purposes of promoting the Sunni movement there.

The recent threat to fund the Sunni side in a civil war is really merely a statement that they will not stop funding the Sunni side.

Yes, there is chaos, but it was nourished by the Saudis who now fear the results, given that they allowed and encouraged a flow of money they could have stopped and have now discovered that instead of the gradual win that they expected to achieve they have sponsored a civil war that they will lose.

Oh Abb1, you are just so CYNICAL. Don’t you know that the war against the secular state of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist Iraq was in fact a war against ‘Islamo-fascism’? And therefore we are actually profoundly OPPOSED to the Islamo-fascist Saudi regime, which is why we ‘sell’ them lots of arms and then lie about the bribes we used to get the deal.

But we do it in a disdainful fashion. That’ll teach ‘em.

I suspect that if they do decide against this particular kind of mass-slaughter, it’s only because of the risk that it might cause serious troubles to another bunch of people with oil – their good friends, Saudis princes.

‘Someone in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office has gotten everybody on this city’s holiday party circuit talking, simply by floating an unlikely Iraq proposal that is worthy of a certain mid-19th century British naturalist with a fascination for natural selection.

We shall call it the Darwin Principle.

The Darwin Principle, Beltway version, basically says that Washington should stop trying to get Sunnis and Shiites to get along and instead just back the Shiites, since there are more of them anyway and they’re likely to win in a fight to the death. After all, the proposal goes, Iraq is 65 percent Shiite and only 20 percent Sunni.

Sorry, Sunnis.

The Darwin Principle is radical, decisive and most likely not going anywhere. But the fact that it has even been under discussion, no matter how briefly, says a lot about the dearth of good options facing the Bush administration and the yearning in this city for some masterstroke to restore optimism about the war. ’

(Emphasis added).

The money quote is here: ‘The longer America tries to woo the Sunnis, the more it risks alienating the Shiites and Kurds, and they’re the ones with the oil. A handful of administration officials have argued that Iraq is not going to hold to together and will splinter along sectarian lines. If so, they say, American interests dictate backing the groups who control the oil-rich areas.’

(This reminds me slightly of another ‘tilt’ of an earlier President, which had impressive results).
Of course if this plan was acted upon (and to be fair, it almost certainly won’t be) this would result in the deaths of thousands (maybe millions, who knows?) of Iraqis, but after all they are just Iraqis, many of whom have never even HEARD of Washington’s ‘holiday party circuit’. If you can imagine such a horror.

To repeat, this plan is highly unlikely to be acted upon, but the fact that it is even being talked about is a sign of a: the Bush administration’s desperation in terms of Iraq and b: the complete moral disintegration of Washington’s rich, white, male, political elite.

So no surprises there.