Austin Bay takes the Blue Pill

Austin Bay escaped reality a while ago. Now he’s found himself in some bizarre parody of reality, and he’s trying to escape that, too:

Iraq, albeit slowly and painfully, is getting stronger politically and militarily. Soon it will have more than one mech division. Eventually it will have better tanks to go with its improving troops– and in any border confrontation its tanks and troops will enjoy US air support. Iraq is one reason Iran wants a nuke– to defend itself against a democratic Iraq that won’t put up with the old Middle Eastern game of tit for tat terror, sectarian and ethnic meddling, and autocratic maintenance.

Why yes, Austin. Iraq is slowly and painfully getting stronger politically and militarily, to the degree that its elected political officials are openly discussing the possibility of the managed disintegration of the country. It’s military capabilities have become so advanced that it is less able to fight the insurgency and stave off civil war now than it was a year ago. It is so threatening that, with the assistance of the 130000 troops from the most powerful army in the world, it can’t manage to secure its capitol, and indeed is in the process of building a moat that is supposed to seal the capitol off from the rest of the country. Iraq is so threatening that its prime minister recently had to visit Iran in order to beg for assistance against the insurgency.

The problem that Bay and Reynolds have is that they must paper over two fundamentally irreconcilable positions. On the one hand, they can’t backtrack on support of the Iraq War, the most notable consequence of which has been the strengthening of Iran’s position in the region. On the other hand, they want to hype the Iranian threat beyond all plausibility. So, at the same time that they decry growing Iranian influence in Iraq, and suggest (implausibly) Iranian control of the Iraqi insurgency, they need to somehow argue that the destruction of Hussein’s regime has actually weakened Iran’s position. The one point where I’ll give credit to Bay is in creativity; most wingnutty warhawks are content to argue that “we have an army next door to Iran” which, of course, ignores the fact that the army in question is currently occupied. Bay takes it a step farther; we don’t actually have to do anything, because the Iraqis are going to take care of all of this for us.

And this is what passes for expert commentary on the right side of the blogosphere. Right Blogistan: A mass consensual hallucination.