Dolchstoßlegende!

(Via Paperwight, The Carpetbagger Report and Slate...)

The GOP is running a web video that pretty clearly accuses its opposition of undermining the U.S. armed services. It's currently linked from the front page of RNC.Org. You really have to see it to believe it's really coming from the Republican National Committee and not some gang of mouth-breathers operating out of a boiler room in West Virginia.

The reason RNC must be feeling the need to do this is obvious. They've been stoking the irrational hopes among their base of support that Iraq will suddenly break out with Jeffersonian Democracy after the elections today. Yet, they know that's an impossible outcome.

As I wrote in the comments to a post over at HolyCoast.Com (yet another X-tian "conservative" blog based in The O.C.), where Rick Moore has been drinking the Kool-Aid™ like we drink Irish whiskey around here:

That's a false hope.

Even if you discount the credibility of the widespread reports of SCIRI ballot forgery, it's completely unreasonable to hope the results of these elections will "get the [Iraqi] government off and running" very far.

The Iraqi "government" is a Failed State. Virtually no order it gives is any more likely to be implemented than if it were to order the precise opposite. It has no army deserving of any respect, and it cannot control even the most secure of its provinces— much less the ones where the insurgency operates with unmitigated freedom. Its parliamentarians are often under attack, and sometimes they're killed, with utter impunity. Its oil pipelines are routinely bombed, depriving it of critical financial capital. It faces a powerful guerrilla insurgency that openly bears contempt for the results of electoral processes in general, and it just wants to overthrow the new order by any means at its disposal, including the massacre of unaligned civilians.

How are elections likely to change any of this?

They have no answer to that. Instead, they're preparing the ground for when the new Iraqi "government" fails, and the American troops are driven into strategic retreat, back to Kuwait and Turkey or elsewhere, so that when those men and women rotate home, they will know whom to blame.

As Paperwight said... Dolchstoßlegende. That's what this is about. Salon notes that this has never happened before in American political history. Dolchstoßlegende, gentlemen. Dolchstoßlegende. Make sure you have your exit visa ready.