It is obvious to roughly three out of four Americans that Bush and his buddies intend to dump this quagmire onto you and me and the next generation. He has already washed his hands of it and we have another painful 15 months ahead with the only I have waited to leave office.

Extending the war, kicking that can down the road, was President Bush’s only strategic objective last January when he came up with the idea of escalating the number of American troops in Iraq from 130,000 to today’s 170,000. Put simply, the Decider wants to hand off the decision to pull the plug on his unwinnable war to someone else, anyone else. Four and a half years after this president ordered the invasion of Iraq in a gross act of arrogance and ignorance based on faulty, bogus and politically twisted intelligence — and after repeatedly changing the rationales and objectives of the war as each has failed in turn — we’re going to continue this war because George W. Bush is incapable of admitting that he was wrong, wrong, wrong. Leaving aside all the happy talk we heard this week about how much better the security picture is in Baghdad, the fact is that the escalation or surge has failed utterly. The stated purpose of this exercise was to buy breathing room for the faltering government of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki and the paralyzed Iraqi parliament to make progress toward national reconciliation.

When you think about the promises that we would be liberators and that democracy would triumph and you look at what actually happened it surprises me that Americans don’t mind this sort of fucking they’re getting. Why is the outrage confined to the pages of editorial columnists? Why are there ANY Bush/Cheney 04 stickers? But there is no attempt by network news personnel to fact check him, question him or do anything more than carry his water in exchange for access. The news organizations remind us often that John Edwards hair cut is expensive. But they rarely remind him that the last commanders that served in the early parts of the war totally disagreed with him. Perhaps Joe Galloway remembers.

I mean doesn't the fact that the Bushies are negotiating with terrorists get any traction anymore? Why aren't the Dems pounding W for finally sitting down with the enemy when they should have done that a year after we invaded?

The hypocrisy. The idiocy.

Every American commander in Iraq has stated the obvious from Day One: This war cannot be won militarily. It cannot be won by American troops. It cannot be won by wishful thinking. It can only be won by the Iraqis themselves, and their definition of victory is built on dreams of bloody revenge and the slaughter of innocents...He and the two yes-men, Petraeus and Crocker, crowed about victory in Anbar province as though American tactics and strategy had something to do with a revolutionary turnaround among Sunni tribal sheiks who, long after even the U.S. Marines were admitting defeat in Anbar, acted in their own self-interest and struck against the al Qaeda in Iraq operatives who were killing their people, their own children.

The TV press and pundit corps rarely talk about the Iraqi government. Or the fact that the Sunnis, the Independents and the Kurds have walked out. In fact, the "International" coalition of the US, Fiji, The Seychelles and Lichtenstein have more cohesiveness than what’s left of the government we propped up in Iraq. But somehow this sort of analysis is left to the corners of the blogosphere.

Will Bush get away with this? From all the evidence at hand, the answer, sadly, is yes. Only the Democrats in Congress stand in his way, and they have yet to find their spines, or a semblance of moral courage, or even a sufficient understanding of the Constitution and its clauses on war making and war-financing, to override The Decider. It’s a long journey from now to January 20, 2009, and the blood of many Americans and even more Iraqis will flow freely and stain the hands of those who allow this insane war to continue at the behest of a stubborn, unseeing, unthinking man from Crawford, Texas.

How long before this shit ends? Does anyone really think the American people are going to sit by for 10 years with our Army there? When I rea dthis column I had hope there are others who feel this way. Even if no one in Washington is listening.

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