David Brooks has to resort to myth to envision a bright future for Iraq

David Brooks' deep-seated NEED to believe that the Bush Administration hasn't destroyed the situation in Iraq beyond repair is so strong that he takes to the Old Testament today in order to try to make sense out of it.

Good Lord, this man is an idiot:

Mr. Past: Your big problem is you don't understand the limits of what governments can achieve. Before this whole Iraq thing, you should have read Elie Kedourie's essay on the British occupation in the 1920's. This isn't history repeating itself, it's the same unbroken pattern.

Kedourie shows the whole history of Iraq is a story of "bloodshed, treason and rapine." He shows how Iraqi politics have always been marked by "murderous currents," "demonic hatreds," "grisly spectacles," Sunni violence and Shiite fanaticism. He shows naïve Westerners who thought they could change all this. He even quotes a memo from a British officer saying Britain should threaten to withdraw because then the Iraqis will be forced to behave responsibly. It's all the same!

The central lesson of the past three years is that societies are not that malleable. Evils do not grow out of manageable defects in the environment that can be neatly fixed. We need to change our mentality, scale back to more realistic expectations.

Mr. Future: Actually, I did read Kedourie, but last night I also reread the Exodus story. The Exodus story reminds us that human beings can transform themselves and their situations. It reminds us that people who embark on generational journeys are the realistic ones, because they are the ones who see all the possibilities the future contains.

The finest things humans have done have been achieved in an Exodus frame of mind. This country was settled and founded by people who adopted the Exodus mentality. The civil rights movement was also led by such people.

Martin Luther King learned from Exodus that it is not enough to sit back and let history slowly evolve. It's sometimes necessary to venture into the hazardous wilderness.

There are times amid the journey when the Promised Land can seem a long way off, when the words "next year in Jerusalem" seem unrealistic. But those are the times when the words mean the most. So of all the lessons to learn from the past three years, the worst would be to settle back into your cold-hearted acceptance of the status quo.

So OK, a book written by people in a primitive time to explain the inexplicable is the last bastion of hope for Iraq? I've long said that there is no limit to the hoops Bush supporters will jump through in order to delude themselves that their guy isn't a complete screwup, but that the Grey Lady is paying Brooks to write this kind of stuff still amazes me.