At this point, I am almost ready to let the Republicans and the Neocons do whatever they want, because whatever they do will worsen the situation and drive them deeper and deeper into the s**t. That's where they deserve to be and that's where I want them. As for the soldiers, well, they know what's going on over there. They can desert if they don't want to go back. Since about Jan 1, 2005, those in favor of this war, and those fighting it have been perfectly aware of how badly it is going and how futile it is. From now on out, they deserve everything they get. America goes into a nosedive? So what. All self-inflicted. All all all self-inflicted. THe one thing I would hold out for is the expropriation of all assets belonging to everyone who supported this war after, say, Sept. 1, 2004. Put them into a common fund, pay most of it to the Iraqis and the rest to the injured soldiers. THen Good night America, and, in many ways, good riddance.

K, so... we all know David Brooks is a douchebag, right? He's smart, OK... and yes, he sometimes has some interesting points -- sometimes. But let's fucking face it: the guy is a card-carrying neo-con, a Bush-rimming, wannabe big-man, chicken hawk, pseudo-intellectual never cut the apron strings from his Jewish mother pansy from hell -- the kind of "thinker" who doesn't know what to do with himself, because he's not a journalist, he's not an academic, he's just a totally effete and out of touch DOUCHEBAG who happens to be a decent writer.

So please, get your hands and eyes on the latest flaking slab of Brooks offal in the NYT today ("Heroes and History") -- without a doubt the most pathetic Bush Dick-suck I've ever read, EVER. And worse, it was printed IN THE NEW YORK TIMES!! (The paper who has also fecklessly refrained from calling out the blatant Republican filibustering of any resolution on Iraq).

Brooks latches onto Bush's shit-eating grin like a child who still wants to believe in Santa Claus. The editorial says SO MUCH about how OUT OF TOUCH the MAINSTREAM MEDIA and THE POWERFUL OF THIS COUNTRY are with regard to the Iraq Disaster. Bush is plucky because none of his children have died FOR NOTHING, because he never worked a day in his life, and because the Dow Jones is pushing 14,000!!! While hardworking, highly educated people have to pay off dozens of thousands of dollars in student loans and go without health insurance, Bush touts "freedom"; while chaining up innocents in Gitmo, he touts "freedom"; while destroying millions of lives in Iraq, he touts "freedom". Oh my fucking God this guy is a disaster!!!

So, no matter what Peter Galbraith says, no matter how long the Sentaors sleep on cots, things are just going to get a LOT worse in this country before they get better. It's the sad part of human nature that we don't learn until it's too late.

Of course the Iraq war is lost, Peter. We've known this for a long, long time. No one gives a shit, apprarently -- or at least none of the oligarchs do.

This article is a classic example of the "don't piss in the fingerbowl" school of nicely, nicely explaining to all you rational folks out there that things are amiss and we should reconsider our actions. It is about three years too late. It is largely inoffensive and even more ineffective. It pretends that we have some kind of Platonic dialogue going on here in America and that a sagacious rejoinder will clarify the issue and put the politicos back on the straight and narrow. Nonsense. Bush and the neocons do not argue rationally. The Republicans do not play fair. The Democrats are a party of mostly cosmetic change. I'm not saying that Mr. Galbraith is a loser or wrong to say what he does, but, frankly, at this stage of the game doesn't his essay sound terribly anemic?

The war was illegal, unethical, and wrong. We should never have gone there. We should not be there. The Republicans are always screaming about how people have to be responsible for themselves and can't expect the government to solve their problems for them. Fine. Let's leave the Iraqis to solve their own damn problems. This is the message that must be iterated and reiterated if we are to have any chance of getting the troops home.

What this article and almost all others fail to mention is the goal of the Shiites well before the invasion. Once they learned that aligning with our government as they did in the Bush 41 confrontation with the Iraqi Sunnis and subsequent slaughter of Shiites by Sadam, their goal was to support an invasion, let us destroy the Bathists, let a civil war ensue and then finally control and run Iraq. The al-Maliki or any Shiite driven administration is only interested in pretending to install a secular Iraq while waiting for us to become impotent and leave. Prolonging our stay or getting involved in a civil war where the enemy of my enemy is my enemy is only killing and wounding more of our military.

If we had any realistic foresight, which our political and many military leaders certainly did not, on what the goal would be for a post Sadam Iraq, it would have had to be partition. Realizing that, realistic leaders would have concluded not to invade and empower al-Qaeda and create millions of refugees and deaths. Realism and humanity have certainly not been part of the equation.

Can we get Americans to sit still for five or ten minutes, to read this? Maybe. I fear that even three pages is too much for too many Americans.

Seriously, Peter Galbraith, can you distill this down to five paragraphs? I need something that short, so that my family will read it. So that they get the ideas before their own snarls drown out their reason.

Would everyone please go to the CBS Face the Nation homepage and watch Bob Schieffer's commentary from 7.15.07 and then send it every supporter of the war they know? This Galbraith article is fine but will it be persuasive to the those Americans we need to persuade? Sadly, no. Are the 4 first letters in this thread persuasive? No, far too angry, too ready to score points.

Schieffer is not a Salon Liberal; he's a very moderate, calm, patient grandfather who, face it, has a lot more credibility with the Moderate Right than does Rahm Emmanuel. These are the people we need to have speak against the war.

We liberals are not listened to by even moderate Republicans; they tune us out. I'm not asking us to be quiet; I'm asking liberals to plead with moderates and fence-sitters to engage with us and then with their good-hearted but misguided friends. I hate Bush as much as the next guy but these clever, vitriolic letters are so much ego gratification. They achieve rhetoric but don't persuade. Really, send the Schieffer clip to everybody and let's emulate his ethos instead of indulging our malice. It's the grownup thing to do at this juncture.