Great piece as always Glenn. You have an open Bold tag somewhere.

Love the blog Glenn but you really need someone to clean up the html.

I cannot understand why (other than basic incompetence or an underlying desire to stay for OIL) this administration cannot implement SMART

Specific

Measurable

Accomplishable(sp)

Results

TIMING

to develop a plan for this Iraq mess and why Congress now doesn't do the same thing. You make a plan with benchmarks and timing, give the commanders what they need to accomplish it, measure it when due, and then re-evaluate and make changes if it needs tweaks.

If I showed up to work and said I have a plan with no benchmarks, no timing, and nothing measurable I would be looking for a new job the next day.

I think we have reached the point where gross incompetence has intruded into "High Crimes and Misdemeanors" territory.

I've been run over by an enterprise web deadline this week so I haven't been able to write, but despite the accurately gloomy and distressed text here there is more hope than most of realize to get out of this.

There's even more hope to end the war soon, really. I'm sorry to be a tease, I'll try to write tonight, but more likely tomorrow morning. If I tell y'all some hoser (not you, Glenn) will lift the story.

Stay on, that's all I can say. This is going to change, these blooodthirsty morons are never going to be this powerful again.

I can remember, on NPR's Fresh Air of all places, an interview before the 2003 invasion that revealed the workings in the Rumfsfeld war room. Generals even then were expressing doubts about the war, and specifically the lack of foresight in planning the war. The interview made it clear that Rumsfeld's style allowed no dissent.

(And I was no news-fiend. I was a random NPR listener who just happened to pick up this report.)

As others have pointed out on these pages (including you), many expressed doubts about the invasion, and not all the doubters were 'progressive.'

So the Post also eres in suggesting that only this one grassroots organizations foresaw the current disaster. It's a good way to duck responsibility for what this newspaper clearly should have been reporting.

I find the Post's wording deliciously vague. It declaims the "inevitable horrors of war." I have yet to read the full editorial, but this statement suggests that the problems in Iraq are the problems of war in general, and not the horrors of an incredibly ill-conceived invasion, acknowledged as such by many high-ranking military and political leaders across the political spectrum, some before, but many since the attack.

This week's article in _The New Yorker_ sadly illustrates the effect this complete lack of planning has had on even our allies in Iraq. The article in the somewhat mainstream magazine details the ways in which our policies (or lack of) have led to the murder and disillutionment of those who would have supported us, who indeed welcomed us.

For the Post to write such an editorial the week this article is printed seems sad indeed.

Funny how Hiatt wants someone to tell him how it will end - provided it isn't the House Democrats.

,The Fred Hiatts of our country sit by quietly when legislation in Congress, as it is every day, is drafted and enacted at the direction of K Street lobbyists and sprawling associations of all sorts of corporate interests. That is all business as usual, things as they should be, our country being quietly moved by the superior, buttoned-down elite. But if Congress once listens to the opinions of actual citizens -- those filthy bloggers and their readers, or grass-roots groups like MoveOn -- that, for Hiatt, is when democracy is imperiled.

More to the point, MoveOn and its members -- unlike Hiatt.

.

E.X.A.C.T.L.Y. You rock Greenwald - even if you are a dirty effing hippie.

Excellent piece. The argument for prolonging the tragedy that continues to unfold before us is now being reduced to its fundamentals by the current occupant of the White House.

We cannot leave because it would do serious damage to our "National Security" interest. That pregnant phrase might be better expressed as "we would lose face." The interest refered to is the ability of our Governing elite to intimidate and bully anyone, anywhere in the world through the use of military force.

What's really at stake is their credibility when they attempt to enforce their agenda on a recalcitrant world. Their prestige, their power. No amount of blood and treasure is too high a price to pay for this noble goal.

The Fred Hiatts of the world, perched in their elite niches, identify completely with this perspective. They just don't have the guts or integrity to say so upfront. So we get the endless round of ever shifting, self-contradicting, implausable rationales, even as they help to feed other people's children into the war machine.

That Hiatt ignores what he wrote before. It was after all last week before he got the new talking points. Reality should never intrude upon a good neocon article. Again (and ,yes ad nauseum) the cult mindset is not logical nor does it require any real personal responsibility on their part. But I think they are scared about the USA investigation. It will provide a significant window into the workings of the (mis)Administrations dealings. As one Democratic congressman said " Every tree we have barked up so far has had a cat in it. Can you imagine where we will be in six months?" I can hardly wait.

But Hiatt and his friends are completely uninterested in the question of how the war will end. Just like Bush, they do not want the war to end ever, because the end of the war will bring about the day they fear most -- the day when it must be acknowledged that the war they brought us was a profound failure and a cataclysmic mistake.

But they will never acknowledge that the war is a mistake. What they are waiting for is someone to end the war so that they can blame “them” for the failure. This is about avoiding responsibility and accountability for their mistakes; their egos are at stake here, and that’s why we can’t leave Iraq while Bush is in office – if we do it now, Bush and his neo-con supporters will not be able to shift the blame to others, they won’t be able to claim we were on the verge of “victory” if only we hadn’t withdrawn.