The following leaps out of the New York Times’ Week and Review and punches you in the gut. If you want to know why Dick Cheney was quickly summoned to Saudi Arabia and why subsequently the Saudi ambassador quit, look no further than this:

SOMEONE in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office has gotten everybody on this city’s holiday party circuit talking, simply by floating an unlikely Iraq proposal that is worthy of a certain mid-19th century British naturalist with a fascination for natural selection.

We shall call it the Darwin Principle.

The Darwin Principle, Beltway version, basically says that Washington should stop trying to get Sunnis and Shiites to get along and instead just back the Shiites, since there are more of them anyway and they’re likely to win in a fight to the death. After all, the proposal goes, Iraq is 65 percent Shiite and only 20 percent Sunni.

Sorry, Sunnis.

The Darwin Principle is radical, decisive and most likely not going anywhere. But the fact that it has even been under discussion, no matter how briefly, says a lot about the dearth of good options facing the Bush administration and the yearning in this city for some masterstroke to restore optimism about the war.

As President Bush and his deputies chew over whether there’s a Hail Mary pass to salvage Iraq, it has become increasingly clear that the president will probably throw the ball toward his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice.

Make no mistake, the Rice way is a long shot as well. It’s a catchall of a plan that has something for everyone. Its goal — if peace and victory can’t be had — is at least to give a moderate Shiite government the backbone necessary to stand up to radicals like Moktada al-Sadr through new alliances with moderate Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds.

In this plan, America’s Sunni Arab allies would press centrist Iraqi Sunnis to support a moderate Shiite government. Outside Baghdad, Sunni leaders would be left alone to run Sunni towns. Radical Shiites, no longer needed for the coalition that keeps the national government afloat, would be marginalized. So would Iran and Syria. To buy off the Sunni Arab countries, the United States would push forward on a comprehensive peace plan in Israel and the Palestinian territories.

The Rice plan seems diplomatic and reasoned. But it breaks no molds. Which is why examining the Darwin Principle better helps explain the mood of the capital right now.

Let me translate this for you. Dick Cheney is frustrated. His project in Iraq is failing. American forces are not capable of restoring order in Iraq. Therefore, he is thinking about letting the Shi’ites massacre the Sunnis with impunity. He’s advocating a genocide.

If that were not bad enough, he is advocating a genocide for the sect of Iran and Hezbollah, against the sect of our allies Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. Thus, even if it were a potentially moral strategy to condone genocide, Dick Cheney’s strategy would leave us without any allies in the region.

It’s true that the strategy is unlikely to get the green light and that there are many encouraging signs in Condi Rice’s alternative. But I am absolutely stunned and demoralized to see genocide even discussed as a potential solution to our problems in Iraq. The fact that such a solution would be an unmitgated strategic disaster as well as a moral one, only makes me more depressed.

The prospect of a Shi’a genocide against the Sunnis has been the one factor giving me pause about advocating a complete pull-out of American troops, and here I see the Vice-President advocating just such a catastrophe as a way to keep our troops there.

I didn’t think it was possible for me to have a lower opinion of Dick Cheney. I was wrong.

It reminds me of a scene from Apocalypse Now.

General Corman: He’s out there operating without any decent restraint, totally beyond the pale of any acceptable human conduct. And he is still in the field commanding troops.

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