ARTICLE: “U.S. Intelligence Offers Grim View Of Iraqi Leaders: Doubt on Bush Tactics; But Report Also Depicts Plans for Withdrawal as Raising Risks,” by Mark Mazzetti, New York Times, 24 August 2007, p. A1.

Count on intell to talk out of both sides of its mouth: the surge isn’t stopping any soft partition, but if we withdraw, it’ll get bloodier.

Something for everyone and a nice middle ground left over for anyone: the soft-partitioning of Iraq is basically a done deal, despite all the experts dismissing the “option.”

The bottom line is unchanged: we are not providing enough security to an Iraq that--quite frankly--is too far gone for us to manage that level of effort. Sunnis and Shiia are turning inward for protection, much like the Kurds did long ago, and so the partitioning and attendant killing proceed apace.

Talk of “preventing genocide” is fine (and it certainly sounds noble), but it’s roughly three years too late. The systematic targeting of enemy tribes began long ago, and reached a level of self-sustainment well before we bothered to surge. The delta in deaths between us maintaining a high level of troops spread out around southern Iraq and us drawing down and pulling back to next-door sanctuaries in Kurdistan and Kuwait is nowhere as near as some would have you believe. We narrowed that difference a while back.

Now, we’re into the question of maintaining U.S. popular support for active and direct presence and engagement in the region, just like in WWII. That conflict rapidly segued into a long war all its own with the Sovs, and this one is nowhere near over WRT radical extremism within Islam.

The question of note remains the same: are you more interested in credit on Iraq or winning the Long War?

Right now Tel Aviv, Riyadh and Tehran are running our foreign policy more than the Bush Administration is, which is a sad state of affairs to witness. The “great decider” seems now more content to follow history than to make it, all hopes for a legacy-minded second-term foreign policy being dashed.

Watching this length Bush post-presidency unfold while the man is still in office is the most painful sight I’ve come across since Jimmy Carter was in power.

The problem is, the only thing that got damaged with Carter was our pride. What’s being destroyed here is a lot more valuable.

And please, spare me the stabbed-in-the-back bullshit on Bush. The only reason why we find ourselves backed into this idiotic corner is because this administration has refused any serious attempt at a diplomatic surge (for several years now!), believing, in the same neocon dumbass mindset that brought us the postwar non-reconstruction, that military matters rule all, so we can't have any diplomacy until we get the war "won." This sort of binary Cold War thinking is so painfully out of date as to be almost criminally negligent.

We're playing with last century's talent and thinking, so why be surprised we're being outgamed by every rogue and its proxy?