Josh Marshall has a piece up about the Bu$h malAdministration conducting yet another flip-flop. There’s much there to savor and I think we could riff of it for a long time, utilizing million monkeys system. Just detailing the sub-plots entailing Dick “dick” Cheney and his headlong rush to corporate dominion of the Middle East is probably engaging better writers than me even as we read.

But this bit stuck out to me:

In the Hersh piece in The New Yorker we learn that the US has essentially decided to get out of the al Qaeda/Sunni-jihadist fighting business and redirect our efforts toward fighting the Iranian peril. The real war we're in the midst of now, it turns out, is the trans-Middle Eastern Sunni-Shi'a civil war. And we're going to side with the Saudis, who will in turn enlist a bunch of al Qaeda type groups to work on our behalf against Iran. Now, you may be worried that this sounds rather like how we got into this mess in the first place. But don't worry. As Hersh writes, the Saudis are assuring the White House, that "they will keep a very close eye on the religious fundamentalists. Their message to us was 'We've created this movement, and we can control it.'"

Now, I know the Bu$h family has been in business with the Saudis in general, and the bin Ladens specifically, for more than 30 years, but it should be pointed out that Mr Hersh quotes the Saudis as admitting they were the founding force of al Quaeda.

And it looks like we’re going to now going to be partners with them in the “conquer Iran” business, too. I’d be interested to know what guarantees we’re getting from the Saudis that they’ll be able to deprogram al-Q when this is all over.

Yeah. I didn’t think so either.