We must destroy Iraq in order to save it...

Robert Dreyfuss has a thoughtful piece over at TomPaine.com:

With Iraq perched at the very precipice of an ethnic and sectarian holocaust, the utter failure of the Bush administration’s policy is revealed with starkest clarity. Iraq may or may not fall into the abyss in the next few days and weeks, but what is no longer in doubt is who is to blame: If Iraq is engulfed in civil war then Americans, Iraqis and the international community must hold President Bush and Vice President Cheney responsible for the destruction of Iraq. The CIA, the State Department, members of Congress and countless Middle East experts warned Bush and Cheney—to no avail—that toppling Saddam could unleash the demons of civil war.

I certainly have no quarrel with anything he said there. I would just like to add that beyond intelligence experts and Middle Eastern scholars, anyone who had taken a 100-level course in world history would have seen this result as a virtual certainty. Any observer not deluded by neocon fantasies realized that Iraq was a pressure cooker with a roiling, toxic soup inside that was kept in place by a tightly-clamped lid.

You know what happens if the pressure cooker lid is removed--right?