All the King's Horses...

Peter W. Galbraith was the United States ambassador to Croatia, so he has a fair amount of experience with irredeemable failure of policy and unstoppable collapse. He points out that the American Iraqi mission is already over, it's just politically impossible to acknowledge it.

WHAT is the mission of the United States military in Iraq now that the insurgency has escalated into a full-blown civil war? According to the Bush administration, it is to support a national unity government that includes all IraqÂ’s major communities: the Shiites, Sunni Arabs and Kurds. O.K., but this raises another question: What does the Iraqi government govern?

And yet the Neo-Cons are now desperately grasping at the straws of the hope that the Israeli invasion of Lebanon will provide them with a proxy victory over Iran and Syria and pull the whole Neo-Con Middle-Eastern redemption fantasy out of the fires of humiliating defeat.

Can the world survive these naive utopian fantasists until 2008?