Waiting for the adults

See Billmon’s post “Babbling Idiots” (tell us what you really think of them, Billmon) and George Packer in the New Yorker about the Iraq Study Group and the paucity of options remaining in Iraq.

I know I can’t wait. What will it be? Partition? because imperialists drawing lines on maps has always been an excellent way of resolving conflicts forever and ever. Pick a new Strong Man? because sooner or later things will get so bad that Achmad Chalabi couldn’t make them any worse. Oh, I just can’t wait.

In the meantime (and for Iraqis, it’s been a very mean time indeed), James Baker and Lee Hamilton have been making numerous appearances on news shows, evidently just to say that they’re not ready to discuss their conclusions and suggestions yet, don’t even bother asking them, and then fill the remaining 10 minutes showing Jim Lehrer pictures of their great-grandchildren. These are election campaign appearances and nothing else, a repeat of the 2000 strategy of surrounding Shrub with “adults,” who would save him from his own callowness. Of course those adults turned out to be Cheney and Rumsfeld. Adults, to be sure, but batshit-insane adults (someone said in 2001 of the Bush Cabinet that there hadn’t been so much pseudo-gravitas in one room since Henry Kissinger dined alone).