The "reality-based" community in action:
The Obama administration has developed a bad habit of founding its Middle East strategies on wishful thinking. In the past year, it has supposed that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad would peacefully agree to cede power at a Geneva peace conference, that the Egyptian generals who carried out a military coup would lead the country back to democracy and that Israelis and Palestinians were ready and willing to reach a final peace settlement in a matter of months.
Now the administration has a new hope: that the frighteningly extreme and war-hungry al-Qaeda state that has established itself in western Iraq and eastern Syria can be tackled through the creation of a new, “inclusive” government in Baghdad that will unite Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish forces against the terrorists.
Like the administration’s previous schemes, the unity government plan has the advantage of basing itself on preexisting doctrine and of requiring little action from the United States other than diplomatic jaw-boning.
Yeah, I was pretty astounded at their revised, "more modest" Middle East hopes before Iraq went belly up:
Good grief, what did they think they'd achieve before they settled on these "more modest" objectives? Did they really believe their own BS about that Cairo Outreach to the Moslem world?
We are so screwed.
Yeah.
