"The terrorist are on the run"...do they just lift these quotes directly from old Vietnam era press conferences? Iraq is a world of hurt, for all involved. Could el Kaida have planned this any better, heck you'd think they designed US foreign policy.

While I am not of the "pull then home now" it is clear that more of the same will lead to more of the same. America has lost all moral authority. This is the end of rising...how fast will we fall?

This is the fruit of ignorant militarism. Acting the part of Golaith stomping around smashing things will win no peace abroad or home. Americans chose this moron to run the country and now they don't like it when they find out that a disinterested fool makes a poor shepherd for an empire.

Howard Dean could have prevented this slide into chaos. Too bad Karl Rove was able to get the Democrats to sideline their best hope for a forceful challenge to this epic foreign policy failure.

I can't remember where I read it but a journalist who went to Iraq noted that they could not leave Badhdad airport to go to the green zone without an armed escort. He noted something to the effect:

"If you do not control the road from the airport to your headquarters you have little control of the country."

I am now using this a measuring stick of "progress" in Iraq. The day anyone can land at the airport and feel safe to travel to any city, let alone the green zone, by car, unescorted, will be the day Iraq is truly free. By this measure there has been no progress and its likely things have actually gotten worse.

Army Col. H.R. McMaster is a soldier-scholar who once advised Gen. John Abizaid, the top Middle Easter commander, on how to wage war in Iraq.

Col. McMaster now is in the heat of that battle himself. For the past several weeks, he has led the campaign to retake the border town of Tal Afar.

Col. McMaster appeared in the Pentagon this week via a video hookup to describe how his 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, joined by 3rd Iraqi Army Division, routed most of the extremists.

But it was his description of how the enemy occupied their safe haven that got the most attention. Col. McMaster told of beheadings, gunshot killings, a booby-trapped dead child and kidnappings. "This is the worst of the worst in terms of people in the world," he said. "To protect themselves here, what the enemy did is they waged the most brutal and murderous campaign against the people of Tal Afar. ... The enemy here did just the most horrible things you can imagine, in one case murdering a child, placing a booby trap within the child's body and waiting for the parent to come recover the body of their child and exploding it to kill the parents."

Col. McMaster said his men killed scores of the enemy in a series of firefights up and down the tight streets of the crossroads between Syria, where insurgents train, and the critical northern Iraqi city of Mosul.

"These Iraqi soldiers are brave," he said. "They're courageous. They're building capabilities every day."

Col. McMaster said soldiers captured some associates of lead terrorist Abu Musab Zarqawi.

"They are some of the worst human beings on the face of the Earth," he said. "There is no really greater pleasure for us than to kill or capture these particular individuals."

Without a doubt, we opened up a can of worms going into Iraq. The situation is a bit unclear. At this point, I am still betting on Arab and Iraqi nationalism to bring Iraq though this period. I don't know how much of this is internal disputes or al-Qaeda. The way al-Qaeda is fighting the war will eventually turn both Sunni and Shia against them. As to the Constitution, the Sunnis have the ability to defeat it in the next election. It would probably be better if an elected Iraqi Assembly wrote the Constitution anyway. It is their business!