If You Won The Lottery, You'd Complain About The Tax

That's my impression after reading Glenn Kessler's For U.S. a Hard Road Is Still Ahead in Iraq. Mr. Sunshine he ain't. And if he ever had impure thoughts about pausing one whole day to reflect on how a constitution was passed by popular acclaim in what used to be one of the world's great dictatorships, I'm sure they were snuffed out by the equally optimistic Robin Wright, who gets a contributor's credit.

The lede:

For the Bush administration, the apparent approval of Iraq's constitution is less of a victory than yet another chance to possibly fashion a political solution that does not result in the bloody division of Iraq.

I'm beginning to think that if Baghdad's civil order surpassed that of Basel, Switzerland and the Iraqi parliament adopted  a Bill of Rights with 90% Sunni support, the Post would lead with a three-part series on underpresentation by African Americans.

Meanwhile, I am trying to wrap my head around the wisdom of using wild Bush critic Juan Cole as one of the wise men commenting on the Hard Road that is Still Ahead... well, that could be a post all by itself.

Kessler quotes Cole:

"This thing is an enormous fiasco," said Juan Cole, a University of Michigan historian and a specialist on Shiite Islam. He said having such a solid bloc in opposition to the constitution "really undermines its legitimacy, and this result guarantees the guerrilla war will go on."..

...Cole said the Bush administration increasingly has little influence over the political turmoil in Iraq. "The whole thing is out of their hands," he said. "The Bush administration is pretty helpless in Iraq."

Here are some other things Cole said, as recounted by Steven Plaut at Front Page mag.com:

“Much of the Arab world has a formal peace treaty with Israel.” (Actually only Egypt and Jordan have, and the former is observed by Egypt mainly in its non-compliance.)

 

“Chemical weapons are not weapons of mass destruction.”

 

“Saddam Hussein never gave any real support to the Palestinian cause, and he did not pay suicide bombers to blow themselves up.”

 

“Supporting orphans is, in any case, not the same as funding terrorism." (Cole is referring to subsidies to the families of suicide bombers by Saddam, the Saudis, and others. Of course there is nothing wrong with the PLO making Jewish children orphans in Old Juan Cole’s eyes.)

You  could spend the rest of the day  entertaining yourself with Juan Cole quotes, and if the Post is going to use him as an expert source, you probably should.