As far as I can tell, the Hindenburg pilots masquerading as our executive branch have two goals for media management on Iraq. First and foremost, they must convince us that we are facing a viable and imminent existential threat. But of no less importance, they must also demonstrate that they and they alone can guarantee our collective salvation. Of course, one can’t but help notice that such aims are mutually exclusive – with the success of one, our naked emperor loses the other by default.

Yet balanced efficiently, Jonestown the American people have historically proven willing to cede virtually unlimited authority. Anyone caught paying attention will have noticed an administration quite adept at maintaining such an equilibrium. Sure, it was rocky there for a while with Iraq galloping toward civil war, but it seems our darling Machiavelli’s have found a way to accomplish both aims in one swoop – arrest some flaming idiots and call them terrorists (deepest apologies to Signore Machiavelli for comparing him to our president).

The most recent, of course, is the JFK plot which most experts found laughable. But kudos to Schneier for reminding us to rejoice in our other great victories, such as the six morons who planned to attack Fort Dix disguised as pizza boys (caught while developing a home movie of the plan), the so-called Miami 7 who planned to blow up the Sears tower “with no weapons, no bombs, no expertise, no money and no operational skill and Iyman Faris, the Ohio trucker who was convicted in 2003 for the laughable plot to take out the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch.”

Evil, perverse, and categorically brilliant! And unfortunately for Dear Leader, no longer enough to polish the stains off of his war. Because no matter how many incompetent boobs we arrest or entrap, this is how far we have come under five years of Bush’s stewardship:

Up to 10,000 U.S. soldiers spearheaded by armored vehicles and covered by helicopter gunships fought their way into an al Qaeda haven in Iraq Tuesday, killing at least 22 extremist fighters, the military said.

Operation Arrowhead Ripper, involving Strykers and Bradley Fighting Vehicles was aimed at smashing al Qaeda operations around Baquba, a hotbed of unrest north of Baghdad, a military statement said.

"The end state is to destroy the al Qaeda influences in this province and eliminate their threat against the people," said Brig. Gen. Mick Bednarek of the 25th Infantry Division.

Nothing spells headlines like a large troop mobilization. But let’s take a step back and look at the math. Ground troops are generally allocated based on a 3:1 ratio which can sometimes go as high as 10:1 depending on external variables. For a dispatch of this magnitude, we can safely assume that some fairly sound intelligence produced estimates of between 1,000 and 3,000 insurgents to be active in the region. For the sake of fairness, let’s split the difference and call it 2,000. So basically, with a 5 to 1 troop advantage aided by armored vehicles and air support, the most advanced military force in world history was able to take out somewhere in the neighborhood of one percent of their target.

With an executive so adept at balancing progress and threat within the media, somehow their reptilian brains can’t grasp that whatever influence al-Qaeda holds is likewise predicated upon convincing Iraqis they are the only bulwark against an existential threat from Western brutality. The idiocy of sending a battalion of centurions to prove them right is exceeded only by the fact that they didn’t even pull it off. And therein lies the great tragedy of leadership – after all this time, they’re still trying to quell an insurgency as though it were purely a mathematical composite.

In a country where malnourished soldiers with rags on their feet repelled the full might of the British Empire, you’d think we’d have figured it out by now.