Surging Incompetence

The carnage continues in Baghdad:

At least 62 people have been killed and scores wounded in a double bombing at a university in Baghdad, officials say. A car bomb blew up outside Mustansiriyah University, and a suicide bomber targeted students as they fled.

Elsewhere in the Iraqi capital, at least 25 people died in car bombings and shootings.

The attacks came as the UN said more than 34,400 Iraqis had died in 2006 in violence across the country.

It also said more than 36,000 civilians were hurt during the year.

The UN's figures were almost three times the Iraq government's estimate.

The uber-right's reaction? A contemptuous "What did you expect?" followed by blaming of the bugbear de jour, Iran. As if it were Iran who had invaded Iraqi soil in a trumped-up hunt for non-existant WMD's then, instead of stabilizing the country, run through meddlesome plan after botched plan for a "victory" which would keep Iraq as a proxy rather than a truly sovereign nation.

Meanwhile, retiring ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad has been trying to reassure the Iraqi people that the Bush administration is simply incompetent.

I can understand and empathize with the Iraqi people. They certainly have suffered a lot. And they've heard positive predictions before, and all of that is true," he said. "But I want them to know that those predictions made before ... were made with the best of intentions, with good plans developed based on understanding of the circumstances of the time."

As I noted yesterday, the reality is that their understanding was and is based upon garbage-in and so the Iraqi people get to experience the reality of their garbage-out policymaking.

Every day. Terminally.

Neither the Iraqis nor the American people trust the Bush administration to find its ass with both hands and a map anymore. In the case of the Iraqis - a nation made and kept weak by the Busheviks - they are being driven into the arms of Iran because their own national interest means they have no choice.

I will say this again, slowly for the uber-right because they are often hard of thinking.

If all the neocon's scaremongering allegations of Iranian machiavellianism are true (and I believe nowhere near even half are) then, all on their own, they provide a final and definitive argument for withdrawing US forces from Iraq...

...because, if true then the Iranians have been playing chess while the Bush administration has been playing tiddliewinks and Bush is, frankly, outclassed.

Postscript Yet more evidence that the Busheviks can't even play tiddliewinks competently and Iran doesn't have to do much of anything except wait to be handed the region by the Bushevik's cack-handedness.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The U.S. military has sold forbidden equipment at least a half-dozen times to middlemen for countries - including Iran and China - who exploited security flaws in the Defense Department's surplus auctions. The sales include fighter jet parts and missile components.

...Federal investigators are increasingly anxious that Iran is within easy reach of a top priority on its shopping list: parts for the precious fleet of F-14 "Tomcat" fighter jets the United States let Iran buy in the 1970s when it was an ally.

...The Pentagon recently retired its Tomcats and is shipping tens of thousands of spare parts to its surplus office - the Defense Reutilization and Marketing Service - where they could be sold in public auctions. Iran is the only other country flying F-14s.