Still digging

New Republic supremo Marty Peretz in Friday's Wall Street Journal (subs. req'd; alt. free link) --

But the enthusiasm of the Democrat Party for Afghanistan is rooted in the fact that Afghanistan is not a strategic asset for the West. It is only a moral triumph. The Democrats prefer to look away from the colder long-term calculations of American and Western interests in the Middle East. We need more than moral triumphs there. We need strategic triumphs. If Iraq turns out not to be the latter sort of triumph, it will be remembered as one of the most momentous blunders in our history.

I think the odds against us are huge. One reason is that Iraq is neither a state that coheres nor a society that coheres. Its civil society, if that is what it is, is not quite a civilized society. The carnage between Shia and Sunni, and the carnage among other religious and ethnic communions, since the end of Ottoman rule have left deep and bloodied breaches in Iraq.

Note both the adoption of the Bush-DeLay incorrect name for the Democratic Party and his criticism of that party for not embracing a war that by his own logic was a doomed effort to civilize a society that didn't want to be civilized.

[Note: this is just one more example of word-choice trickery by Peretz]

UPDATE: Peretz, having undoubtledly seen the above via Matthew Yglesias now says that "Democrat Party" crept into the article and was unintended. Which is more explanation than he ever offered for how Rhodesia suddenly got changed back to Zimbabwe.

FINAL UPDATE: Some time before 0338 GMT, the online version of the article was changed to add the "ic" to Democrat.