The Iraqi parliament postponed its Sunday session after the main political blocs failed to agree on candidates for key security posts, the deputy speaker said, as violence surged in the country.

The decision came despite urgent last-minute efforts by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad to reach agreement from Iraq's fractious ethnic and sectarian groups on who will head the Defense and Interior ministries.

To break the deadlock, Al-Maliki had promised to present candidates Sunday and let the 275-member parliament decide, but Deputy Speaker Khalid al-Atiya said legislators needed more time. Al-Atiya, a Shiite, said that due to the large number of candidates and the inability to reach any agreement, the political parties decided "to give the prime minister another chance to have more negotiations."

Our new ambassador and the prime minister couldn't pull that off. Not good. Things won't get better for a bit longer, or maybe a lot longer. Now what?

So how did things come to such a pass?

Responsibility point one - should those who argued long and hard that we should invade Iraq and remove the government there, and won the argument, be held responsible for the mess there now? Give them a pass on the weapons of mass destruction thing - everyone makes mistakes - and a pass on the ties between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, as that was what they really did think, even if that Osama fellow had spent many years denouncing Saddam Hussein as an enemy if true Islam. He might have been kidding, after all. You never know. But the war is in its fourth year, and there is more than a bit of chaos there even now, and, after three elections, no unity government. Could these difficulties have been anticipated?

Of course the plan was to have the Iraqi-American Chalabi run the joint - we'd be out in six months. But no one there liked him, and in all the voting there he never got enough votes for even one seat in the new parliament, much less enough votes to form a government. He had that PhD in math for the University of Chicago where he knew both Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, and we paid his band of exiles loads of money for intelligence about the situation on the ground there - the weapons programs and who was important and who not - and Dick Cheney said he was Iraq's true George Washington and all.

So that didn't work out. But there was no Plan B, as that would have been such a negative thing to develop - it would mean you might be wrong. Do we fault the architects of the war for being optimistic? We like that trait, don't we? No ones like a nay-saying defeatist always whining about this or that, of course.

But when we are told not to worry, that "things will be just fine" and to see the wonderful possibilities, and then the result is a mess, do we say, optimism aside (it's a fine thing, generally), that those in charge of what our government does may have incredibly poor judgment? That's not to say those who lead should not be optimistic. It's only to say they should look at all the facts and think things through, and maybe have a contingency plan or two up their sleeves. "But it might have worked" is historically interesting, a curious argument that can be discussed in the hypothetical. The people dying now, every day, and our more than twenty-five hundred dead and tens of thousands maimed, aren't historically interesting - that's a problem now. We removed a brutal dictator, a truly awful man, and in his place said "try democracy" - but assume it would be relatively easy to get going and we could leave as heroes. Shouldn't someone have thought about a few "what if" scenarios, considering the history of the place and who there really knew and liked the University of Chicago PhD fellow? It would have been the responsible thing to do. But then, there is this tension between being responsible and being optimistic. Some can do both - call it tempered optimism - but these guys like to keep it simple. And the president is not a curious fellow.

That lack of curiosity is dangerous.

Terry Gross interviews that loser, Al Gore, on NPR's Fresh Air here -

GROSS: You got to see George W. Bush close-up when he was your opponent for the presidency. What surprises you most about how the Bush presidency has turned out?

GORE: I guess what surprises me most is his incuriosity. That's a real mystery to me because he's clearly a smart man. He has a different kind of intelligence, as everybody does. There are so many varieties of intelligence. He's clearly a smart man, but it is a puzzle that he would ask no questions about important matters. When his first secretary of the Treasury came in for their first meeting and spoke for an hour about economic policies of the new administration, he asked not a single question. When he received the briefing in August of 2001 that Osama bin Laden was planning a major attack soon, you know, on the United States, he did not ask a single question. When he was briefed several days before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and the weather service people were saying it may mark a return to medieval conditions, he asked not a single question. And that same incuriosity seems to be a factor when he just accepts hook, line and sinker the ExxonMobil view that global warming is not a problem, in no way related to the massive volumes of pollution we're putting into the Earth's atmosphere every hour of every day.

When they tell him that the scientific community is wrong and that they're just lying because they're greedy for more research dollars, he doesn't apparently look under the rug. He doesn't ask questions. And in the American system, the president of the United States is the only person who is charged with representing all of the people in every state in every district and looking after the welfare of the people as a whole. And if the special interest has one view, at least you should ask questions about how the public interest is affected, and I really do not know why he is so incurious.

No one knows, and it may not matter much; that is, the "why" may not matter much. But it here's an idea - it is the leader's responsibility to be curious. Gore seems to think so. But he lost.

Ah well, we'll get right with Iran, making them give up their nuclear weapons program - through threats that won impress them (our forces are stretched a bit thin) and "incentives" they find insulting. Now they threaten a "disruption" to world's oil supply (see this), our fashionable secretary of state, the Rice woman, says it's nothing, they need the oil revenue and they won't do anything - and as the weekend ends the spot price of oil jumps way up (see this). The markets don't function on best-case optimism. Traders look at what's likely and have a Plan B, and Plans C through Z of course. But that's so negative, and ticks off the administration. Being realistic and planning for all the possibilities, not just the "best-case, seem wrong to them. To the rest of us? One supposes we're really supposed to wonder about our unpatriotic realism. Or something.

Responsibility point two?

Not our fault, as in this -

Isa Khalaf doesn't want cash from the U.S. troops he says massacred his relatives in a March raid. He wants an explanation he may never get now that a U.S. probe has cleared them of any wrongdoing.

Standing in the rubble that remains of his brother's house that was pulverized in the small town of Ishaqi, Khalaf recalled the young children that were lost as the sound of gunfire and helicopters rattled the village.

"I don't want compensation. I want answers," he said.

The U.S. investigation that cleared soldiers of any misconduct in Ishaqi may have allowed the soldiers to move on with their lives. But the farming town will be haunted by memories of the bloodshed.

The U.S. military said on Friday that soldiers chasing insurgents took direct fire in Ishaqi and up to nine collateral deaths, a military term for civilian casualties, resulted from an engagement.

It denied as "absolutely false" allegations that troops executed a family living in a safe house for "terrorists," and then hid the alleged crimes by directing an air strike.

... Police had different accounts of what happened during the March raid. They said five children, four women and two men were shot dead by troops in a house that was then blown up.
All the victims were shot in the head and the bodies, with hands bound, were dumped in one room before the house was destroyed, police added.

... The Ishaqi findings come amid an investigation into allegations U.S. Marines massacred up to two dozen unarmed civilians in the town of Haditha in November. Several other killings are also under investigation.

New Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has promised Iraqis justice and criticized the American actions.

But judging by the mood in Ishaqi, Iraqis have learned not to expect too much from their new U.S.-backed democracy.

But we say our guys did nothing wrong. They were chasing bad guys, and one ran into the house, so calling in the C-130 gunship that laid down a wall of fifty millimeter high-velocity hot metal for a few hours was a logical decision. Sorry about the dead kids. And your other evidence doesn't matter. It was, unfortunately, necessary.

Of what's necessary, and responsibility, see Andrew Sullivan here -

From the moment George W. Bush exempted U.S. military forces from the Geneva Conventions if "military necessity" demanded it, he sent a message. From the moment George W. Bush refused to accept Donald Rumsfeld's repeated offers to resign after Abu Ghraib, he sent a message. From the moment, George W. Bush appended a signing statement to the McCain Amendment, arguing that as commander-in-chief, he was not subject to the ban on torture and abuse of military prisoners, the president sent a message.

Those messages - in a tense and dangerous war, where bad things will always happen - made a difficult situation one where abuse and war crimes were almost bound to take place. And command responsibility in the military goes upward. The president cannot fill the role of being commander-in-chief in order to declare "Mission Accomplished" and then choose not to fill the role when his troops commit war-crimes and torture and atrocities. In what George W. Bush himself calls a "responsibility society," he has ultimate responsibility for the forces he commands. And there is a direct and obvious line between his decisions to break decades' long adherence to the Geneva Conventions and the pandemic of torture, and now incidents of war crimes, that have plagued this war and stained the honor of this country.

To say this is not to be, as Glenn Reynolds argues, "pathetic and poisonous." It is to face the fact that this president has formally lowered the moral standards for American warfare - in writing, and by his actions. He was given a chance to stop this with the McCain Amendment, and he dodged it. He is now reaping the whirlwind. We all are - not the least the vast majority of great and honorable soldiers whose profession has been stained by a derelict defense secretary and a torture-condoning president. The troops deserve so much better. So does America.

Yeah, well, maybe. He's just not a detail guy. And he likes to keep this positive.

Leave the detail to the Brits, like this long item in the Sunday Observer, containing this -

Some have tried to defend the killings by pointing to the stress that US soldiers - many of whom are on their second or third tour of duty - are under. But it is clear that there are other, deeper problems within the US military that point to a widespread failure of command.

At the heart of the issue is a culture of violence against Iraqi civilians that has been present in large measure since the moment US forces crossed the border into Iraq - an inability and unwillingness to distinguish between civilians and combatants that as three years have passed has been transformed, for some, into something more deliberate.

The point - "It is a lack of discipline that has been commented on with horror by British officers - representing an army that itself has seen its own soldiers seriously mistreat Iraqi civilians." And so since the Haditha thing, witnesses to other civilian killings that haven't come to the surface yet are contacting this British paper, offering information, including witnesses to the killings at the wedding party near the Syrian border, where we just scoffed when such reports first surfaced. The newspaper? "After Haditha, it seems such denials can no longer be taken at face value."

But it's just detail. And people make mistakes. And there are always "bad apples."

And the was the Sunday, June 4, 2006, New York Times lead editorial with this -

The apparent cold-blooded killing last November of 24 Iraqi civilians by United States marines at Haditha will be hard to dispose of with another Washington damage control operation. The Iraqi government has made clear that it will not sit still for one, and neither should the American people. This affair cannot simply be dismissed as the spontaneous cruelty of a few bad men.

This is the nightmare that everyone worried about when the Iraq invasion took place. Critics of the war predicted that American troops would become an occupying force, unable to distinguish between innocent civilians and murderous insurgents, propelled down the same path that led the British to disaster in Northern Ireland and American troops to grief in Vietnam. The Bush administration understood the dangers too, but dismissed them out of its deep, unwarranted confidence that friendly Iraqis would quickly be able to take control of their own government and impose order on their own people.

Now that we have reached the one place we most wanted to avoid, it will not do to focus blame narrowly on the Marine unit suspected of carrying out these killings and ignore the administration officials, from President Bush on down, who made the chances of this sort of disaster so much greater by deliberately blurring the rules governing the conduct of American soldiers in the field. The inquiry also needs to critically examine the behavior of top commanders responsible for ensuring lawful and professional conduct and of midlevel officers who apparently covered up the Haditha incident for months until journalists' inquiries forced a more honest review.

So far, nothing in President Bush's repeated statements on the issue offers any real assurance that the White House and the Pentagon will not once again try to protect the most senior military and political ranks from proper accountability. This is the pattern that this administration has repeatedly followed in the past - in the torture scandal at Abu Ghraib, in the beating deaths of prisoners at Bagram air base in Afghanistan and in the serial abuses of justice and constitutional principle at Guantánamo Bay.

These damage control operations have done a great job of shielding the reputations of top military commanders and high-ranking Pentagon officials. But it has been at the expense of things that are far more precious: America's international reputation and the honor of the United States military. The overwhelming majority of American troops in Iraq are dedicated military professionals, doing their best to behave correctly under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. Their good name requires a serious inquiry, not another deflection of blame to the lowest-ranking troops on the scene.

And so on, and it ends with this -

It should not surprise anyone that this war - launched on the basis of false intelligence analysis, managed by a Pentagon exempted from normal standards of command responsibility and still far from achieving minimally acceptable results - is increasingly unpopular with the American people. At the very least, the public is now entitled to straight answers on what went wrong at Haditha and who, besides those at the bottom of the chain of command, will be required to take responsibility for it.

Yeah, right. No one above Staff Sergeant, of course.

In defense of the president there was this -

He knew that Iraq would be rough but in a post 9/11 world it would have been criminal to have allowed Saddam to stay. He had defied the UN 17 times, had not allowed inspectors in which was ordered after he signed the cease fire in 1991, had used WMD's on his own people, had attempted to assassinate Bush Sr, had shot at our planes over the no-fly zones, and most importantly... had ties to Al-Qaeda. Bush had said he supported terrorism and now the Saddam documents bear this fact out. While not involved in 9/11 he sure did support and enable Al-Qaeda to continue on their quest.

Right. Whatever. And there was Mark Steyn in the Chicago Sun-Times, with Events At Haditha Don't Change Need For Victory - "A superpower that wallows in paranoia and glorifies self-loathing cannot endure and doesn't deserve to."

And check out the video of William "Bill" Kristol on Fox News Sunday here discussing recent comments made by Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khameni - then, in mid-comment, stopping himself and saying "Maybe we should have Supreme Leader Bush. I kind of like the sound of that." Of course it was Kristol's Project for the New American Century that developed the whole plan in the Middle East.

Well, there are different views on responsibility, it seems.

On a minor note, this is the time of year when at college graduations across the nation various famous people give graduation speeches, on that very topic, responsibility. And you can see here that the speaker at Knox College in Galesburg Illinois was the satirist Stephen Colbert. The college was founded by abolitionists so Colbert did say he was coming out against slavery - "I just hope the mainstream media gives me credit for the stand I've taken today."

His persona on Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report" is that of an arrogant rightwing Bill O'Reilly type, so that fit, but he did add this, out of character - "I don't know if they've told you what's been happening in the world while you've been matriculating. The world is waiting for you people with a club... They are playing for KEEPS out there, folks."

Of course he opened with an explanation - "My name is Stephen Colbert, but I actually play someone on television named Stephen Colbert, who looks like me, and talks like me, but who says things with a straight face he doesn't mean."

Keep them guessing. As in this - "It's time for illegal immigrants to go - right after they finish (building) those walls." People keep saying immigrants built America, "but here's the thing, it's built now. I think it was finished in the '70s sometime. From this point it's only a touch-up and repair job." And as for the border he suggested not just a wall, but "moats, fiery moats and fiery moats with fire-proof crocodiles." And he backed English as the official language of the United States - "God wrote (the Bible) in English for a reason: So it could be taught in our public schools."

But the core -

He closed his speech on an apparently semi-serious note, urging the grads to learn how to say "yes." He noted that saying yes will sometimes get them in trouble or make them look like a fool. But he added: "Remember, you cannot be both young and wise. Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly cynics. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don't learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blinder, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us.

"Cynics always say no. But saying yes begins things. Saying yes is how things grow. Saying yes leads to knowledge. Yes is for young people. So for as long as you have the strength to, say yes.

"And that's The Word."

Amusing. And his advice isn't bad. And whoever walked into the Oval Office and said to the president, "Boss, this war thing might need some work, because there are a few things that could get us in trouble," might have heard the words, "Yes? Tell me more."

Ah, but that's in an alternative universe. In this universe there are all sorts of rightwing politicians quoting Colbert, no realizing he's making fun of them. You could look it up. Satire is hard these days. And true believers - see Kristol above - just don't deal well with irony. They don't get it

And in the non-alternative universe, see this, the top ten signs of the impending US police state, as compiled by one Allan Uthman.

Here are the headings:

1. The Internet Clampdown
2. "The Long War"
3. The USA PATRIOT Act
4. Prison Camps
5. Touchscreen Voting Machines
6. Signing Statements
7. Warrantless Wiretapping
8. Free Speech Zones
9. High-ranking Whistleblowers
10. The CIA Shakeup

The details are there. But satire is better.