This week, Charles Krauthammer returns to his favorite theme of late: Iraq -- it's all the fault of the bloody wogs.

Behold The Hammer's brilliant intellectual contortionism, as he absolves the U.S. of any and all responsibility for the carnage that's unfolded following our little war of choice ...

This week the internecine warfare in Iraq, already bewildering -- Sunni vs. Shiite, Kurd vs. Arab, jihadist vs. infidel, with various Iranians, Syrians and assorted freelancers thrown into the maelstrom -- went bizarre. In one of the biggest battles of the war, Iraqi troops reinforced by Americans wiped out a heavily armed, well-entrenched millenarian Shiite sect preparing to take over Najaf, kill the moderate Shiite clergy (including Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani) and proclaim its leader the returned messiah.

The battle was a success -- 263 extremists killed, 502 captured.
Actually, that story's looking entirely bogus (which, rather than being "bizarre," is pretty much just par for the course). Dahr Jamail reports that the tale of wacky Shiite cultists clashing with mainstream Shiite pilgrims was a "lie," and that locals believe the "attack was launched by the central government of Baghdad to stifle growing Shia-Sunni unity in the area" -- we wouldn't want that. (Also check out Patrick Cockburn's account.) It looks like the "extremists" Krauthammer's so proud of having killed were just pilgrims -- locals. Jamail adds: "Much of the killing was done by U.S. and British warplanes."

It's a good thing that nothing that happens in Iraq is our fault.

Back to Krauthammer ...

There are, of course, many reasons for these schisms. Some, like the fundamental division between Sunni and Shiite, are ancient. Some of the wounds are more contemporary, most notably the social devastation and political ruin brought upon the country by 30 years of Saddamist totalitarianism and its particularly sadistic persecution of Shiites and Kurds.
"Ancient enmities" is a nice out, but between the time when the Brits were expelled in the 1920s and the U.S. gave Saddam the go-ahead to wipe out the Shiite rebellion in 1991, Iraqis lived side-by-side, intermarried and didn't give a damn about who was a Shiite and who a Sunni.

And when Krauthammer talks about the ravages of 30 years of dictatorship, he conveniently overlooks that the CIA helped Saddam take power, and that we coddled him for 18 of those years. Only pernicious historical revisionism supports Krauthammer's thesis.

America comes and liberates them from the tyrant who kept everyone living in fear, and the ancient animosities and more recent resentments begin to play themselves out to deadly effect.
It's hard to say whether the appropriate reaction to the statement, "America liberated Iraq" is to laugh or to cry. It sure is a ridiculous assertion.

But it gets more ridiculous still. I now present to you, gentle readers, The Stupidest Thing Krauthammer's Ever Written:

Much of their killing -- the murder of innocent Shiites in their mosques and markets -- is bereft of politics.
WTF? Bereft of politics?

Sure, mixed into the toxic soup that Iraq has become is rampant criminality -- kidnappings for profit and the like. But Krauthammer's trying desperately to remove the bloody horror from its real context: a struggle for power -- and political (and literal) survival -- following the dismantling of a functional Iraqi government. That's all -- all -- about politics.

Iraqis were given their freedom, and yet many have chosen civil war. Among all these religious prejudices, ancient wounds, social resentments and tribal antagonisms, who gets the blame for the rivers of blood? You can always count on some to find the blame in America.
[Screaming; hitting head against his desk]

Yes, what silliness it is to blame America -- all we did is invade the country for no reason whatsoever and create an environment almost guaranteed to foster violent factionalism.

Note the passive construction: "Iraqis were given their freedom." We never attacked their country. In fact, how could anyone blame us for any of it? We were minding our own business, and there was Iraq in that bar, late at night, all slutted up with that low-cut blouse and clingy skirt -- that bitch was asking for it!

Of the idea that we "gave" Iraq a civil war, Krauthammer's close to apoplectic ...

Of all the accounts of the current situation, this is by far the most stupid. And the most pernicious ... We gave them a civil war? Why? Because we failed to prevent it? Do the police in America have on their hands the blood of the 16,000 murders they failed to prevent last year?
Ah, an analogy. And nobody's better at invoking the false analogue than Charlie K.

Let's try a more apt one. Say the president decided that, because "freedom can be messy," it would be OK to eliminate the local government of, say, Cleveland. And just as Clevelanders got really steamed by the power outages, lack of drinking water and sewage and the garbage piling up in the streets, Bush decided to fire the entire police force and send them home -- with their guns! -- and then blacklisted them, making any other government jobs impossible to come by. Would the administration be to blame for the 50,000 additional murders that would surely follow?

Not for Krauthammer, because Bush is a Republican!

The Hammer's latest offering continues, but I really can't take any more. Feel free to finish picking over the bones in the comments.

Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer.