Bob Kerry on Iraq

Bob Kerry, who has been wrong about just about everything since 2003 (see ThinkProgress, here), has a bizarre editorial in the WSJ today basically saying that we need to keep fighting away in Iraq or bad things will happen there.

The paragraph that really jumped out at me, though, was this one:

No matter how incompetent the Bush administration and no matter how poorly they chose their words to describe themselves and their political opponents, Iraq was a larger national security risk after Sept. 11 than it was before. And no matter how much we might want to turn the clock back and either avoid the invasion itself or the blunders that followed, we cannot. The war to overthrow Saddam Hussein is over. What remains is a war to overthrow the government of Iraq.

First, the "Bush is incompetent, but set that aside for now" argument is now the standard disclaimer of the dead enders on the right who continue to justify our catastrophic invasion. Secondly, the idea that we are now in a war to overthrow a government that we've hand picked and backed is just fundamentally wrong. That is not what is going on in Iraq today, plain and simple. The problem is that there is no functioning government in Iraq today and that we've created a situation where a functioning government that respects the existence of competing Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish rights may be an impossibility.