Paul Krugman writes:

The only real question about the planned "surge" in Iraq -- which is better described as a Vietnam-style escalation -- is whether its proponents are cynical or delusional.

Senator Joseph Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, thinks they're cynical. He recently told The Washington Post that administration officials are simply running out the clock, so that the next president will be "the guy landing helicopters inside the Green Zone, taking people off the roof."

Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science for his research on irrationality in decision-making, thinks they're delusional. Mr. Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon recently argued in Foreign Policy magazine that the administration's unwillingness to face reality in Iraq reflects a basic human aversion to cutting one's losses -- the same instinct that makes gamblers stay at the table, hoping to break even.

Both theories have appeared at one point or another in this blog: I recall titling one entry "Double or Nothing," and I've described US provocation of Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence as a stall tactic, a way of buying time until various elections and events have slipped past. So there's nothing new here; just the dead weight of sedimentation piling up.

It's hard to see why anyone would think that a troop "surge" would do the US any good. Every surge scheme to date has failed. The US political command of Iraq is visibly weakening, and not just because the American people are more than willing to write this misadventure off. The more immediate problem is that the Shiite militias have strengthened to the point where they could break the whole country open. That happened largely because we armed them to fight the Sunnis, but also because if we hadn't armed and empowered them, they wouldn't have had any need for us. Bush's people always assumed they have infinite time to deal with Iraq -- that, following the lesson they took from Vietnam, the only way we can lose is if we quit. In reality, the clock has been ticking down both here and there.

Krugman continues:

Either way, what's clear is the enormous price our nation is paying for President Bush's character flaws.

I began writing about the Bush administration's infallibility complex, the president's Captain Queeg-like inability to own up to mistakes, almost a year before the invasion of Iraq. When you put a man like that in a position of power -- the kind of position where he can punish people who tell him what he doesn't want to hear, and base policy decisions on the advice of people who play to his vanity -- it's a recipe for disaster.

Consider, on one side, the case of the C.I.A.'s Baghdad station chief during 2004, who provided accurate assessments of the deteriorating situation in Iraq. "What is he, some kind of defeatist?" asked the president -- and according to The Washington Post, at the end of his tour, the station chief "was punished with a poor assignment."

Actually, this is more than a character flaw. It's a deep-seated belief that real problems can be overcome by character -- stubborn persistence, moral certainty, self-gratifying rhetoric, and if/when all that fails, bribes and prayer. It demonstrates a frightening inability to understand how the world really works, which starts with an inability to imagine how other people see us. The old joke about rich kids is that they were born on third base and taught to think they'd hit a triple. Krugman finds an interesting pattern in this:

The principal proponents of the "surge" are William Kristol of The Weekly Standard and Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute. [ . . . ] And am I the only person to notice that after all the Oedipal innuendo surrounding the Iraq Study Group -- Daddy's men coming in to fix Junior's mess, etc. -- Mr. Bush turned for advice to two other sons of famous and more successful fathers?

It's a pretty sad state of affairs when a psychoanalysis cliché offers a better explanation for what went wrong than the media and the so-called opposition politicians can come up with.