If you don’t read Josh Marshall every day you’re definitely missing out. He outdoes himself today with a prediction that is almost certainly going to become a reality, and it would surely be in full flower already if Andrew Sullivan, ever apoplectic over the BBC and his “fifth column,” weren’t still on vacation.

He spells out a scenario that’s likely to develop as everybody in Team Bush passes the buck on the utter mess that is now Iraq:

It would go something like this: To the extent that we’re facing reverses in Iraq, we’re not facing them because the plan was flawed or incompetently executed. We’re facing them because the plan was sabotaged – by its enemies at home.

The saboteurs were the folks at the State Department and the CIA who stymied effective collaboration with the pre-war Iraqi opposition and members of the defeatist press who have a) demoralized Americans by exaggerating the problems with the occupation of Iraq and b)encouraged the mix of jihadists and Baathists, by creating that demoralization, to keep up their resistance and bombing by giving them the hope that America can be run out of the country.

For my part, I doubt it’ll work. But I think that’s where we’re going.

He likens the scenario to that which developed in Germany after it lost the Great War, when the nationalists (including, most notably, the fuehrer to be) blamed it all on the “November Criminals,” a consortioum of Jews and Communists they insisted were bent on seeing Germany humiliated and defeated.

We’ll know pretty soon whether he’s right. It would be totally consistent with this administration’s behavior as exhibited during the blame-the-CIA frenzy over the Niger uranium.