http://pmcarpenter.blogs.com/p_m_carpenters_commentary/2007/10/its-over-george.htmlGeorge, listen up. Concentrate. Even your idol, Abe, would now call it quits. He would conclude that though he once had virtually no hope of winning this war, he now has absolutely no hope of winning this war... There now officially remains not one solitary justification for staying the course, for there is no acceptable course on which to stay. Either Iraq is partitioned, which you oppose, or it settles into a permanent sectarian power structure of brutal ethnic cleansing and minority oppression, which you also claim to oppose. There is no other future, George, no Third Way.
"I don't think there is something called reconciliation, and there will be no reconciliation as such," said the Kurdish deputy prime minister of Iraq. "To me, it is a very inaccurate term. This is a struggle about power."
...Those "in the driver's seat" had taken to calling it a "national unity government," which now, it is straighforwardly and abominably clear, is neither national, unified, nor governmental in any recognizable sense of the word. It is wholly sectarian, based wholly on supporting Shiite militia power, and has no interest in resolving the heretofore most troublesome issues of oil-resource management, the reintegration of former Baath Party members into positions of authority, or the blending of Iraq's police force with Sunnis.....
George, Abe believed he would triumph, in time, given his concomitant belief in the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force. But you have no overwhelming force, George. What you did have was the slimmest of hopes that Iraqi politicians would work things out, but even they are now telling you and the world that that simply isn't going to happen. And they're no longer just secretly telegraphing this to your war department -- they are, instead, brazenly open about it. And we believe them.