Believing What They Want To Be True

By Cernig

Ilan Goldenberg on the Bush administration's tendency to make assumptions:

Karen DeYoung has a great article in the Washington Post about the never ending security agreement negotiations.  This particular assessment sets off all kinds of alarm bells. 

U.S. officials, uncertain of where Maliki really stands, tell themselves that ultimately he cannot afford for U.S. operations to shut down.

Basic rule about Iraq.  Whenever American officials start "telling themselves" things, instead of simply looking at the situation as it actually is, you know they're in trouble.  Officials in the Bush administration told themselves we'd be greeted as liberators.  Told themselves there was a direct connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq and that there were WMDs.  Told themselves that there was no insurgency and it was just some dead-enders.  Told themselves all kinds of things that were not confirmed by intelligence or realities on the ground.

In the last year and half things have changed with a less ideological more pragmatic crew running the show.  Both the Awakenings movement / Sons of Iraq and the Sadr ceasefire were the result of a willingness to pragmatically agreeing to work with, or at the very least tolerate, former enemies.

But from the start, the negotiations over a security arrangement have been based on assumptions that may or may not be true.  If they turn out to be wrong then the U.S. may find itself on January 1, 2009 with approximately 130,000-140,000 troops sitting in Iraq without legal protections - a potentially disastrous and untenable situation. 

Read, as they say, the whole thing.

Then consider John Mccain, who seems to be dead set on staying in Iraq no matter what the Iraqis think - assuming "If we had to, we could just force it down the Iraqis throats". How disasterously wrong he could be is left as an exercise for your imagination.