All Intensive Purposes

George Will picks up the meme. Ambassador Khalilzad is "heroic" and "indispensable," not withstanding that he is making "threats" that are "not credible":

After Iraqis voted in December for sectarian politics, an observer said Iraq had conducted not an election but a census. Now America's heroic ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, one of two indispensable men in Iraq, has warned the Iraqi political class that unless the defense and interior ministries are nonsectarian, meaning not run as instruments of the Shiites, the United States will have to reconsider its support for Iraq's military and police. But that threat is not credible: U.S. strategy in Iraq by now involves little more than making the Iraqi military and police competent. As the president said last week: "Our strategy in Iraq is that the Iraqis stand up, we'll stand down."

Iraq's prime minister responded to Khalilzad's warning by accusing him of interfering in Iraq's "internal affairs." Think about that, and about the distinction drawn by the U.S. official in Iraq who, evidently looking on what he considers the bright side, told Eliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins, "This isn't a war. It's violent nation-building."

Here's a new theory about the Khalilzad loving: It's a way for writers to signal their fair-mindedness and ability to discern quality within the administration even as they chronicle how Iraq is passing from bad to worse.

Will continues, quoting Lawrence Kaplan:

"With U.S reconstruction aid running out, Iraq's infrastructure, never fully restored to begin with, decays by the hour. . . . The level of corruption that pervades Iraq's ministerial orbit . . . would have made South Vietnam's kleptocrats blush. . . . [C]orruption has helped drive every public service measure -- electricity, potable water, heating oil -- down below its prewar norm."

If Iraq's government is that corrupt, does it really matter what Khalilzad says? Maybe he's heroic, but not indispensable.

Previously:
Our man in Baghdad
Our man in Baghdad II
Our man in Baghdad III