John Podesta, Bill Clinton’ s fourth (and final) White House chief-of-staff has joined hands with Iranian-American scholar (and Keith Olbermann look-alike) Ray Tayekh along with talk show personality/author Lawrence Korb, a gentleman who spent the first four years of the Reagan administration at the cutting edge of national security policy as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manpower, Reserve Affairs, Installations and Logistics. Together the three wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post intended to stiffen the spines of any presidential candidates – they know who they are – now running on an anti-war platform, but who might be toying with the notion of going all wobbly and governing responsibly once in office.

Podesta is the president of the George Soros-funded Center for American Progress, where Korb also serves as a senior fellow. For his part, Tayekh is a Council of Foreign Relations senior fellow taken to arguing that we’ve heard quite enough of this middle eastern democracy foolishness, and that any notion of containing Iranian nuclear ambitions is all so much stuff. Best just get used to it.

Rarely have three such brilliant and accomplished men combined to produce such rubbish:

Despite the Democratic presidential candidates’ expressed commitment to ending the war in Iraq, there is unease among the party’s base. Some ardent activists have suggested that upon election, a new Democratic president will come under inordinate pressure to sustain the U.S. military commitment to Iraq, albeit with some modifications. This concern demonstrates both the difficulty of ending a controversial war and the necessity of doing so.

That logic was a little twisty, did you follow? The concern among ardent activists that a Democratic president might decide to sustain the military commitment to Iraq demonstrates the necessity of ending it. You may have to read it again, or maybe simplify. Repeat after me: “Concern demonstrates necessity.”

It makes a kind of sense now, doesn’t it?

Now this:

The shadow of Vietnam looms, as it has become standard Republican narrative that back then it was the Democrats in Congress who stabbed America in the back by cutting off funding for a winning cause. The fact that the war was lost in Southeast Asia, as opposed to the halls of Congress, is no matter.

I’m really surprised these luminaries would choose such inhospitable terrain so early in their argument. After having smashed the domestic Viet Cong insurgency during Tet, and fighting the NVA army to a standstill, the war was lost in Southeast Asia because Congress stabbed our erstwhile allies in the back back by refusing to provide them the assistance we’d promised when the North violated the Paris accords and re-crossed the DMZ in force. It was scarcely our finest hour as a nation, but that doesn’t make this a “Republican narrative.” It’s hardly even controversial, apart from those who choose to blind themselves to the bloody human consequences of their high-minded actions. About which we shall have more later.

The prevailing doomsday scenario suggests that an American departure would lead to genocide and mayhem. But is that true? Iraq today belongs to Iraqis; it is an ancient civilization with its own norms and tendencies. It is entirely possible that in the absence of a cumbersome and clumsy American occupation, Iraqis will make their own bargains and compacts, heading off the genocide that many seem to anticipate.

Of course, it’s also entirely possible, as the democratically elected government of Iraq appears to believe, that the whole thing will collapse into a genocidal Roman holiday if we depart on a domestic political timeline rather than by viewing the facts on the ground. This paragraph reveals the stunning simplicity of the authors’ biases: The incompetence of America’s political class makes it incapable of improving a bad situation abroad. We should therefore focus our incompetence instead on improving bad situations at home.

Well.

I think it’s also possible that after five years and nearly 4000 American lives, those who fervently declared the “surge” a failure before it had even begun owe the rest of us a moment or two more of contemplative silence when faced with the evidence that violence continues sharply lower month after month and that the Iraqi government is finally moving on policies towards national reconciliation. Even if it doesn’t satisfy the impatient timelines of a domestic political class that would like to talk about something else.

Eternally pessimistic about the ability of the US to contribute to a favorable outcome in the region, the authors are strangely optimistic about the potential for some of the world’s most heinous civil rights violators to make a positive difference:

Moreover, a U.S. withdrawal would finally compel the region to claim Iraq, forcing the Saudis, Iranians, Jordanians and others to decide whether a civil war is in their interests. Faced with that stark reality, they may seek to mediate rather than inflame Iraq’s squabbles.

What if the hard-eyed bargainers of the world’s bloodiest bazaars decide that a civil war is in their interest? Or, rather, that the cost of not fighting to the last Iraqi is more unbearable than ceding Iraq to Iranian political dominance? What if the Sunni majority in Islam decides that an Iraq with its capital in Tehran is not the best thing since the Safavid dynasty? That’s at least equally likely, but of little value apparently alongside the necessitarian concerns of ardent activists.

But let’s talk strategery:

The strategic necessities of ending the war have never been more compelling. In today’s Middle East, America is neither liked nor respected. Iran flaunts its nuclear ambitions, confident that a bogged-down Washington has limited options but to concede to its mounting infractions. Afghanistan is rapidly descending into a Taliban-dominated state as the Bush administration responds only with plaintive complaints about NATO’s lack of resolution. And the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is nowhere near resolution.

The 15th anniversary of the first World Trade Center attack is a particularly inauspicious date to remind the rest of us how much more we were liked and respected before George W. Bush went and made a mess of things. And while it might be churlish to point this out – rapid descents or otherwise – Afghanistan was a Taliban-dominated state hosting a toxic terrorist organization scheming on a plot to kill innocents in their thousands back in the days when gray heads like John Podesta thought firing TLAMs into the empty desert made Wise Policy. Let me be generous to my elders and pass for now on the opportunity to remark upon the subject of “resolving” the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Because now we come to the rub, at least insofar as it concerns the luminaries from the Center for American Progress:

A Democratic president would also be wise to realize that perpetuating the war conflicts with a robust domestic agenda. At a time of mounting deficits, when we are spending about $10 billion a month in Iraq, issues such as reforming the health-care system and repairing the national infrastructure are likely to remain neglected. The United States has too many national priorities that cannot be realized if yet another beleaguered administration prolongs this costly and unpopular war.

All those thousands that have died, all the billions we have spent, all those whose genocidal murders will never trouble the souls of concerned ardent activists, the maelstrom we will leave behind, the wicked forces that will fill it, the loss of access, influence and prestige, all these conflict with health care reform. And that bridge in Minnesota.

Rubbish.