The perverse results of the president’s decision to invade Iraq should now be obvious to everyone. There was no weapons threat and no Iraq-Al Qaeda connection.

Now, Al Qaeda operatives are streaming into Iraq with the help of Iran and cooperating with remnants of the Hussein regime in a head-on attempt to damage and humiliate the United States. Furthermore, the ranks of viable recruits is as long as the list of newly radicalized Muslims in the whole of Iraq.

We are lucky only that they appear to have — for the time being — chosen Iraq as their prime target rather than “the homeland.” Still, the national-security benefit of the Iraq war is still highly dubious. Instead of attacking Al Qaeda at “the time of our choosing,” they have American soldiers on their heels, nervous that around every corner is another disaster.

The Hussein regime was successfully contained, but the anarchic Iraq of today is a greater threat than ever to U.S. security. The president’s policy of unncecessary, preemptive war created this dilemma. This is the worst of all: Now the battle against Al Qaeda must share time, energy, and increasingly scarce resources with the ungainly attempt to remake an ethnically and religiously fractured country which has known only oppression and a Soviet-style economy into a functioning, democratic, tolerant society devoted to free enterprise and the suppression of terrorism.

To stay means serving as a target and recruiting tool for anti-American terrorists while sucking up the military resources so badly needed to fight the terror war on the homefront and elsewhere around the globe. To leave quickly probably means making Iraq just another client state with a questionable devotion to fighting terrorism and yet another example of the United States’ lackluster devotion to democracy in the Middle East.

There is, as Justin Raimondo writes, “no U-turn on the road to empire.” Other than that, it’s been a splendid little war.

To maneuver ourselves out of this sticky situation would take the intelligence of a rocket scientist and the delicate touch of a brain surgeon. Whatever else might be said about Dubya, he doesn’t possess those qualities. He doesn’t possess even the inclination to reflect that he was wrong to have fought this war.

I don’t know what the best way out of this box is. Frankly, I’m too disgusted to even bother trying to conjure the ideal solution anyway, since it’s so painfully obvious that Dubya & Co. are impervious to the colossal nature of their mistake. Of course it’s good that Hussein is gone. The war can’t be said to have been a total failure because it did achieve the ouster of his regime, but U.S. security should be the first objective of U.S. foreign policy (an exotic idea, I know), and this war has done nothing to further U.S. security and done just about everything to endanger it.

I only hope at this point Iraq doesn’t go as badly as it can, not too many American soldiers come home in bodybags, and that Dubya & Co. don’t get the notion that another little war — this time with Iran — is the way to take their Iraq troubles off the front pages.

(Also posted to Stand Down.)