Mark Kleiman is praising the right-leaning Daniel Drezner for facing the facts about the CPA in Iraq: that it was staffed by people chosen solely for ideological purity, with results that even they recognized as dismal. Drezner quotes one, from a Washington Post piece:

Within the marble-walled palace of the CPA's headquarters inside Baghdad's protected Green Zone, there is an aching sense of a mission unaccomplished. "Did we really do what we needed to do? What we promised to do?" a senior CPA official said. "Nobody here believes that."....

Drezner laments this. Not so his commenters. Replying to another observation from newspaper pieces, that

Passed over, in some cases, were diplomats and foreign policy specialists with backgrounds in Middle East issues or nation-building....

one David Thomson ripostes, in the first comment on Drezner's post:

The Bush administration should be congratulated on keep these fools outside of Iraq. They cannot be trusted. Their knives are ready to stab the President in the back. Many of these “foreign policy specialists” are Arabists and follow the ideological beliefs of Edward Said. These people are not worthy of respect and must be marginalized as quickly as possible.

and in response to Drezner's own

“It's still worth keeping in mind that despite these missteps, the situation in Iraq is still not hopeless.”

Thomson goes further:

On the contrary, the situation looks fairly bright. Very soon we are likely to hear how President Bush is so “lucky.” Iraq is already a success. The only remaining question is how much brighter is this country’s future. And yes, dangerous days admittedly lay ahead. Suicide bombers will not disappear for a number of years down the road. Americans and other westerners must remain very cautious. Still, the good vastly outweighs the bad. The disgustingly immoral media elite are finding it difficult to hide the booming American economy. They are rapidly also unable to lie about the good news coming out of Iraq.

So, the people on the scene have an "aching sense of a mission unaccomplished" -- but that doesn't keep ideologues at home from proclaiming a smashing success... any day now.

More: on Arabist fools stabbing Dubya's crew in the back: Some neocons have been alleging that an Iraqi intelligence agent was doing scutwork for al Qaeda in Malaysia. Distinguished expert Juan Cole points out that these are two people with two different names that sound vaguely alike, at least if you don't know Arabic. Clearly an expression of his ideological bias...