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WONK LAND. Matt Yglesias responds to yet another report arguing for a sensible, diplomacy-oriented push for peace in Iraq:
At the present day, the set of options that might plausibly occur between today and January 2009 are:1) Bush gets his way.2)Enough Republicans get freaked out that congress is able to force Bush to start withdrawing troops.Under the circumstances, the political impact of things like this Pollack/Pascual report seem to me to be mostly pernicious. It mostly serves to obscure the real issues and choices in play. It lets people continue with the delusion that they're floating off on some worthy path between Bush and Bush's opponents. This nicely serves various people's sense of vanity and desire to avoid undue association with dirty fucking hippies, but it's every bit as detached from realities on the ground in America as Bush's policies are from realities in Iraq. Either the Bush steamroller is going to plow forward for 18 more months, or else congress is going to muster the votes to shut it down.This is quite correct. One could imagine, also, a world in which people like Pollack and Pascual evinced some recognition of this political landscape and included, in their report, an argument for why their path was politically plausible -- indeed, more politically plausible than other proposals -- and what would be needed to pressure the Bush administration into adopting it. Instead, they're sort of floating around in the consequence free world of wonkery, offering up fine ideas which folks in the consequences-free world of punditry can then use as a basis for filling column inches. But for all the intellectual lifting that's gone into these lovingly crafted proposals, they're utterly useless without an attendant political argument.--Ezra Klein
