If only someone would tell Comrade Bush what is going on

The most remarkable thing about Christopher Hitchens' out-of-cycle contribution for Slate on the news that Henry Kissinger is advising the White House about Iraq is its refusal to acknowledge who ultimately make the decisions. Various disasters are attributed to Kissinger's influence, including those of his supposed protege Paul Bremer. This reaches its epitome in his closing paragraphs where he resists -- as he has to -- the Vietnam comparison:

For the analogy to hold, we should have to find that while this militant rhetoric [against withdrawal] was being deployed in public a sellout, and a scuttle was being prepared behind the scenes. We are not fighting the Viet Cong in Iraq but the Khmer Rouge. A bungled withdrawal would lead to another Cambodia, not another Vietnam. It would be too horrible for Kissinger to live to see two such triumphs.

So Hitch closes the circle by defining the above strategy as what Kissinger would do when in fact it's what circumstances and innate cynicism and dishonesty will make George W. Bush do. As it did Kissinger's old boss, Richard Nixon. If this was Lord of the Rings, Hitch would be, till the end, obsessing about Wormtongue as the key to the whole thing.