Now that the U.S. has engaged in another brutally stupid act, it is time to call attention again to its utterly cynical and completely self-defeating nature.

As another poster has remarked, the past is prologue, so I will start with that:

Overnight, the US has managed to turn the press coverage to its favor by putting out releases that focus on "rat lines" and the like, i.e. "The US and Iraqi government accuse Damascus of being reluctant to guard its borders and not doing enough to stop militants, including those from al-Qaeda, crossing the border into Iraq."

But the real question is why now. Syria has been improving border compliance steadily. Patreaus [sic]announced this month that Syria has brought down infiltration from 100 to 20 a month. [from Syria Comment.]

Well, another answer to 'why now?' would be that now that al-Maliki has ensured that ethnic cleansing made Baghdad a Shiite city, and with U.S. help he prevailed over his Shiite enemies (cf. the battles of Sadr City and Basra, which despite Admin propaganda, could not have been won without U.S. superweapons), he has now turned his attention to the 'Sunni Awakening' who were so fortuitious to Gen. Petraeus' cause. And these Awakened, who were to have been transferred from U.S. to Iraqi payrolls, have discovered that it was better for them when they relied on 'the kindness of strangers.'  

Now, let's see who Landis, author of Syria Comment, thinks is the strategic wizard(s) behind this raid now [via his addendum, he changes his attribution; the larger picture view, however, is the same. Petraeus is in fact a 'Rockefeller Republican,' hence 'realist,' and much more compatible with Obama's worldview than Bush's. In fact Petraeus' ambition, which has caused him to become, tragically, a tool of the White House, would lead him to better behavor in an Obama Administration, as he would be more likely to say what he really thinks. But I digress] :

I think we can assume that this cross border raid was not inspired by Patreaus. It has the finger prints of the White House. Patreaus and Rice have consistently fought to improve relations with Syria in order to win better coordination on the border.

This would explain why press releases on this issue are being released from "sources" in Washington and not being made by boots on the ground in Iraq. My hunch is that Centcom in Iraq is furious about being pressed to carry out this raid during the last minutes of Bush authority. They understand that it will complicate any future efforts to improve Syrian-US relations, which is the only real way to get better cooperation on the border issue. By ordering this raid, the Bush administration has administered a poison pill to US-Syrian relations and to Syrian-Iraq relations. 

As Jonathan Marcus of the BBC has written, "With the Bush administration on the way out, this US military incursion may represent something of a parting shot against the Syrians."

 And the upshot, of course, is that this will benefit McCain, who putatively (but absurdly) "knows how to keep us safe" in time of war.

 Now while Landis may be wrong about the particulars of the attack, he surely is correct in his deduction that this is ultimately serving narrow and partisan ends, i.e., influencing the Middle East for Republican purposes. And by 'Republican' I mean the faction of the Republican Party that supports McCain.

We are, however, drawing the ire of every nation in the region via this gambit, even Israel's.

Not to worry, however. A 'League of Democracies,' every bit as effectual as Wilson's 'League of Nations,' is slated to inherit, in the neocon dream, the corrupt mantle of the United Nations, and that polar azimuthal map, which foreign-policy 'realists' (appeasers by any other name) are not yet ready to abandon, will be replaced by a map showing all 51 states: the U.S. and its two Georgias.

(Actually, there may be an aversion to anything polar in the neocon mind, which might ultimately result in only 50 states despite the duplication of Georgias. Hence the enthusiasm for the AIP in certain quarters of the Palin camp, and its desire to deprive the Union of its polar regions. Poles, after all, come in twos, when speaking of geography,and it was a French habit of objecting to the unnatural conception of a "unipolar" world that may have led neocon dreamers to give up completely on the very idea of a polar view, which inherently leads us to think of what the world might look like when viewed from the other side. Neocons picture the world as being more like a Mobius strip attached to a disk, aka the twisted sphere, which has no other side.)