The Obama administration: From frying pan to fire?

Nearly everyone else calls it a profoundly predictable -- and regularly predicted -- reality, in which questions of right directions and wrong directions take an irrelevant backseat to ineluctable historical forces.

It is nice to see, however, that the Obama administration has already developed its own little slice of Orwellian heaven: they're not insurgents, they're not bloody terrorists, they're not vengeful lunatic sectarians -- they're "rejectionists."

That's not so bad. Rejectionists can be logically counseled, assuaged and convinced. Vengeful lunatic sectarians breed like incestuous rabbits on some kind of unholy goof juice and interpret all efforts to thin their numbers and reduce their passions as merely one more sign from God to try harder.

One can easily see why Clinton, loaded with eyebrow-raising euphemisms, got what the NY Times called "a jittery reception" last week "from a country that still plainly relies on the United States for security, stability and economic survival." Iraq's old ways -- those predictable, predicted ways -- are back, with suicide bombings last week alone killing 160, among "18 major attacks this month [which] have kindled fears that Baathist jihadist elements could be reconstituting themselves into a smaller, but still deadly, insurgency that will exploit the withdrawal of American troops between now and 2011."

Clinton denied what everyone knows: "that Iraq was slipping back into the sectarian violence that convulsed it two years ago." The only emendation required of that passage is the changing of was to is. I understand her saying that -- or rather, her not saying that -- since she was (is) only doing her job with as much graceful hokum as possible.

"His view," she said, referring to Gen. Ray Odierno, the American commander in Iraq, "is my view, that these are tragic and terrible events, but they do not reflect any diversion from the security progress that has been made." 18 major attacks, and the month is not yet done -- and while certainly "tragic and terrible," they just as unmistakably "reflect" worse than a mere diversion. They reflect a continuity of old, a picking up of where things left off, a confirmation that former presidential candidate Joe Biden was the only one who had it right to begin with: short of a Saddamlike strongman, a de facto partition of this sectarian hellhole is the only resolution.

George Bush's naive belief in, and even more naive introduction of, democracy sure hasn't helped; indeed, its malignant -- and inevitable -- populist incarnation has been but one more poison in Iraq's bloody ethno-sectarian mix:

Despite Mr. Maliki’s success in provincial elections in January and in projecting himself as a strong nonsectarian leader, his Dawa Party recognizes that it still needs his Shiite partners to govern. And his Shiite rivals ... have accused him of recently orchestrating a wholesale return of Baathists to bolster his standing with the Sunni minority. Mr. Maliki, political experts say, cannot afford to alienate fellow Shiites ahead of the general elections in December....

On March 28, Mr. Maliki’s Shiite-led government arrested a prominent Sunni leader on charges of heading a secret armed wing of Mr. Hussein’s Baath Party. A week later, the prime minister accused Baathists of orchestrating car bombings that killed more than 40 people. [Last] Monday, he lashed out again, saying the Baath Party was "filled with hate from head to toe."

So whatever Maliki's inner philosophical preferences, the political beast in him is cornered: He's like a Republican pol suffering the fires of evangelical torches in primaries, necessarily stoking hate and fanning the eager flames of righteous division. (If 18th-century America had actually been as "Christian" as many right wingers claim today, the Founders never would have recommended a representative democracy: sanctimony and secularism don't mix.)

But despite Clinton's self-aware delusion -- come on, she can't really believe what she proffered in Iraqi public -- I hope she keeps right on selling it. I hope she peddles it and peddles it, and I hope Gen. Odierno peddles it and Barack Obama peddles it, too. Because only a willful and prodigious blindness to reality on Iraqi ground will evacuate American forces from it.

Besides, those fighting American men and women must be spared in Iraq because their bodily sacrifice awaits them in Afghanistan, and probably Pakistan -- two more religiously fanatic nations whose historical forces we are impotent to change, but there we'll squander countless lives and untold treasury until we disingenuously but desperately declare that they, too, are "going in the right direction."