THE LOW POST: An Undeniable Embarrassment

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Q: The other sensitive issue that people want to know is your position on, because this has come up often, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's rejection that there was a Holocaust. Do you believe that there was a Holocaust in which 6 million Jews were killed?

A: I am currently thinking about the Iraqi issues.

-- CNN's Wolf Blitzer, interviewing Iraqi Shiite leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, who was in the U.S. for a meeting with George W. Bush. Al-Hakim repeatedly declined to answer the Holocaust question.

The Bush administration's Iraq adventure is beginning to remind me of that section in Catch-22 when mess officer Milo Minderbinder buys up the entire Egyptian cotton crop. At first Milo thinks he's getting the deal of the century, but in the end he just gets stuck with a shitload of cotton that he can't sell. Next thing you know, he's covering raw cotton with melted chocolate and trying to serve it as a dessert to the guys in the mess hall. People are choking everywhere, throwing up, and Milo just keeps smiling, pretending it's delicious....

The Iraq war is sort of the same thing. Bush and Rumsfeld and all of those clowns went into that country with their heads full of idiot fantasies -- Arab kids joyously throwing flowers at GIs, liberated Bedouins buying Dockers slacks in bulk and quoting Thomas Jefferson in cyber-cafes, young Muslims packing meeting halls in Mosul and Tal Afar to hear Tom Friedman preach about globalization. That didn't exactly work out, and now four years later George Bush is in the unenviable position of having to invite to the White House a Holocaust denier and proud love slave of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and then shake his hand, smile and sell him as America's best hope for democracy in "free" Iraq.

A pessimist would call that a real shitty situation, but I'm counting on Bush to balk at that suggestion and take the optimistic course, the obvious chocolate-covered cotton move. Which is this: instead of making some craven apology for getting in bed with a Holocaust denier, Bush should just deny the Holocaust himself!

I'm not saying there's no downside to this move for Bush -- he'd never be rid of Abe Foxman, for one thing -- but if he made Holocaust denial official U.S. policy, just peevishly said something like "Heck, it's not like it's ever been proven" at an afternoon press conference, then he could at least have pretended that he wasn't forced into this devil's alliance with al-Hakim. Throw your arm around him and smile: Things are going exactly as planned! Nothing is fucked here!

That's what the old Bush would have done, anyway. The old Bush, the guy we all learned to love in the early part of this decade, he and Karl Rove would have seen this situation as an opportunity, an intellectual challenge. The pre-indictment Rove anyway would never have backed down. He would have issued the appropriate Holocaust talking points, and after three weeks of Rush and Hannity and Savage taking shots at Hamptons liberal Steven Spielberg and the big-foreheaded Irish Kinsey-lover Liam Neeson and the sexually ambiguous pickle-slurping creep Adrian Brody -- and everyone else who's ever been in a Holocaust movie -- the polls even on that issue would have come around eventually, no doubt about it.