Senator Lindsey Graham returned from Iraq recently to announce that the The Surge in Iraq “is working beyond my expectations.”

Graham says that although the Iraqi government has made no progress whatsoever toward resolving the political issues that in the more secure environment that The Surge was meant to create — Graham says he hinted to the Iraqis that “time is running out” on that score; no doubt they trembled — and that although U.S. and Iraqi military casualties are up substantially since The Surge began, and that although the caranage wreaked upon Iraqi civilians has returned to pre-Surge levels, U.S. forces “literally have the enemy on the run. The Sunni part of Iraq has really rejected al-Qaida all over the country. We’re getting more information about al-Qaida operations than we’ve ever received.”

Never mind that Graham has enthusiastically adopted the “all al-Qaeda all the time” theme, which is, at long last, adequately deconstructed by the New York Times ombudsman in today’s paper. It’s natural to want to think of one enemy rather than a dozen or two, which is what the U.S. faces in Iraq. And it’s natural to choose the enemy with the name most likely to resonate among Americans, and it’s convenient to choose the enemy constituting the smallest part of the opposition to our presence there, and the one that exists largely on sufferance from its more populous fellow travelers.

Never mind all that, or that we’re simply doing Graham the courtesy of pretending that there are circumstances under which it’s conceivable that he could have come back from Iraq publicly disappointed. We’re taking him at his word: things are going better than he expected. Which means, since things are getting worse, and there are no discernable signs of progress other than that some of the people we’re fighting have turned upon some of the other people we’re fighting, with whom they shared at one time an uneasy coexistence, that Graham’s baseline favorable expectations must have been apocalyptic. We have to conclude that for him, the only scenario in which there are no U.S. troops in Iraq is the one in which they’ve all been killed, because up to the moment before the last troop dies, there will always have been something that went well enough to justify our continuing presence.

We also have to conclude that since we’re doing everything right but things are still getting worse, some other factor external to U.S. troops and the enemies we’re routing is responsible for the bad things that are happening. Some powerfully inimical force is dragging us down.

Could it be … Satan Iran?

Graham didn’t mention Iran, perhaps because he’s more focused on stanching the immediate wound, the one that is bleeding Republican support for whatever it is they think we’re doing over there. Sooner or later, though, he’ll have to come round to rationalizing our failures, and the White House line on Iran, which is that we’re in an undeclared war with them, albeit one that hasn’t quite escalated to the point where we have to fight back, is ready and waiting for him. In the not especially likely event that Democrats and the more vocally discouraged Republicans put together a veto-proof majority in support of legislation ending the adventure, Iran awaits; Iran is to U.S. war lovers as Jews were to Hitler; both the excuse for and the object of their criminal desires.

So there’s that to look forward to, after the summer recess. It’s pleasingly symmetrical that we can count on Graham’s murderous optimism to resurface after a bludgeoning in much the same way that we can count on the insurgents in Iraq to do so, and with much the same outcome for anyone in the line of fire.

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