Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall

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But as yesterday’s piece in the Times made clear, that’s exactly the opposite of what the government — or rather the people in the government paid to analyze these things — actually believes. A new and still highly classified National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq says that the best case scenario for the country over the next eighteen months is drift, along more or less the lines that it’s at right now. The worst case scenario is all-out civil war. The middle ground is spiralling extremism and fragmentation — basically a continuation of the evolution, or rather devolution, we’ve seen over the last year.

Joshua has a lot of very sensible things to say about the current political situation.