Believe it. Biden gave Ryan Crocker a message at the Senate briefings today to take back with him to Baghdad: “We’re not staying. We’re not staying. (There’s) not much time.” So much for Odierno’s estimate that he won’t be able to properly assess the merits of the surge until November. As I write this, there’s a report on the wires of our great moral tutor, the Messiah himself, shrugging off the prospect of genocide as a justification for continuing the troop presence on grounds that genocide’s happening in Africa too and we’re not traipsing off to prevent that. That’s an odd subject on which to take a hard egalitarian line, and god only knows where it leaves the left’s table-pounding about Darfur, but it’s also flatly, knowingly incorrect. Click here and listen to Iraqi ambassador Samir al-Sumaidaie explain the difference. If you can’t spare five minutes to listen to the whole thing, fast forward to the second half. Money:

To have created a mess and to turn around and walk way from it, apart from the fact that it is immoral in my view, it is not without a price. The price will be a destabilized Middle East, rampant international terrorism, which is bound to visit you here at home sooner or later. So, some clear thinking has to be made about the price.

The left would argue that “shortsighted, self-defeating, and immoral” describes the whole war, but as Sumaidaie says, even if you believe that’s true — which he seems not to — what good does that do Iraqis now if it’s used as an excuse to pull out and abandon them to their fate? The disconnect here is that for the left this is, has been, and forever will be Bush’s responsibility, not America’s, so the culpability for genocide is his (and conservatives’) alone. If you look at it that way, Obama’s Darfur analogy makes perfect sense. Democrats didn’t enable the genocide in the Sudan and Democrats didn’t enable a genocide in Iraq, so why should they commit troops for either? You see now why they’re so paranoid about blame: they don’t want any responsibility for the consequences of what’s about to happen, even though they’re the ones in charge of Congress.

I meant to link this WaPo piece the other day but never got around to it. Read it now. It holds out some hope that withdrawal wouldn’t be cataclysmic, just “ugly.” Pentagon war games show the Shiites pushing the Sunnis out of Baghdad and into Anbar, a SCIRI/Sadr mini-civil war in the south with Iran playing a major role in some form of another, and the Kurds pleading with U.S. troops to station themselves up north and act as a de facto insurance policy against a Turkish invasion. Endgame: partition. The question is how many would die on each side before the sectarian populations were finally settled into their new mini-states. And the other question is, if the military believes this is inevitable, whether we should be encouraging those population transfers now while we’re still around to keep them semi-orderly.