AFTER BAGHDAD. I hate to be one of those guys who just links an article, pulls a money graf, and tell you to read the whole thing. But In this case I can't help myself. Josh Marshall has a great piece in the Washington Monthly about the real long-term aims of this Administration in the Middle East. I've often read the exhortations of Michael "Faster, Please" Ledeen and wondered if he could be serious. He is, and he's not the only, nor the most highly placed, one. And, as promised, here's one of several Marshall money grafs:

Today, however, the great majority of the American people have no concept of what kind of conflict the president is leading them into. The White House has presented this as a war to depose Saddam Hussein in order to keep him from acquiring weapons of mass destruction--a goal that the majority of Americans support. But the White House really has in mind an enterprise of a scale, cost, and scope that would be almost impossible to sell to the American public. The White House knows that. So it hasn't even tried. Instead, it's focused on getting us into Iraq with the hope of setting off a sequence of events that will draw us inexorably towards the agenda they have in mind.

That agenda comprises a long, bloody, costly drive to pacify the Middle East -- all of it, pretty much -- by force or threat thereof, accomplished with little input or assistance from the rest of the civilized world.

Such as it is, the plan has its attractions ("Like a character in a bad made-for-TV thriller from the 1970s," writes Marshall, "you can hear yourself saying, 'That plan's just crazy enough to work'"). And you can understand why its high-level advocates have been keeping it on the down-low -- a couple of American Presidents have asked the nation to finish a World War, but none before now has asked us to start one.

But it induces shivers to contemplate how disingenuously, and how easily, we are led down this dark and dismal path. Marshall notes that "the brazenness of this approach would be hard to believe if it weren't entirely in line with how the administration has pursued so many of its other policy goals." The ruinous tax plans, ominous Patriot Acts, and other life-changing measures that fly, barely noticed, through Congress seem to bear him out. Our course is uncharted, our progress headlong, and we watch American Idol and night-vision footage and hope for the best.

Something will come of this, wrote Dickens once, I hope it mayn't be human gore. But that, now more than ever, is hoping against hope.