CUE ALANIS MORISSETTE

AP today (emphasis added):

The debate in Washington over troop numbers is intense. But in Baghdad, there's been little sense of alarm or urgency among the Iraqi politicians who would have the most to lose if the United States decides to begin a major pull back.

Both Sunni and Shiite leaders have been largely convinced for weeks that President Bush would press to keep forces in Iraq until he turns the White House over to a successor.

That has set up one of the grand ironies of the troop build-up that began early this year.

Washington threw more personnel and firepower into Iraq to give the Iraqi leadership more room to settle disputes and adopt U.S.-backed reforms.

But the signals this week of just modest troop withdrawals ahead -- perhaps back to pre-surge levels of about 130,000 -- mean the Shiite-led government feels little pressure to accelerate work toward true political reconciliation....

Oh, good grief -- this isn't an "irony," any more than it would be "irony" if you took large amounts of crystal meth every day in the belief that it would make you feel better and instead it wound up making you feel miserable and destroying your health, just as every sensible person you knew predicted it would.

An "irony," according to my dictionary, is "incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result." It's not "incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the result expected by the ignorant, infantile, narcissistic instigator of those events, who thinks whatever he does will turn out splendidly, despite the fact that this has never actually been the case."

Sensible people have known for quite a while that our continued presence in Iraq just makes it possible for Iraq not to grow up and take responsibility for itself. Only Bush and his bootlickers think otherwise. Things are going just the way we've predicted they would --and that's not ironic.