Our Betters, the permanent Beltway ruling class, the cocktail wienie-gobbling clowns and Republican creatures and think-tank dilettantes and shadowy Christianist billionaires who created the Iraq Clusterfuck and now can't figure out how to evade accountability for the greatest strategic disaster in American history...

Well, they're doing the same thing and expecting a different result. They're going to follow Dear Leader deeper into the qWagmire! And drag us down with them. The Grey Lady reports with a straight face:

Bush’s Task: Thrusting New Strategy on ‘a Sovereign Nation'

(Note that, as usual--"thrusting"--it's all about the size of The Deciders's rapidly shriveling cock manly "firmness". These guys really need to come up with some new language here. But let that pass.)

Now, as President Bush prepares to unveil his new strategy for Iraq on Wednesday night, the question is this: Can American officials compel the Iraqis to follow the new American plan?

“It’s a sovereign nation; it’s their system, they make those decisions,” Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the American command’s chief spokesman in Iraq, said last week.

“Let me put it this way: at the end of the day, we’re going to have to do some forcing,” said Kenneth M. Pollack, an expert on Iraq at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.

“We have to make it impossible,” he said, for Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki “not to do the right thing; for him to say, ‘Look, we have no choice, the Americans are forcing us.’ ”

So, Maliki might as well lay back and enjoy it, eh? Read more…

Exhibit One: Maliki stoned by mob in Baghdad.

Exhibit Two: Government ministers avoiding showing up for work for fear of being shot or kidnapped.

There will be Exhibits three, four, five...and lots more in the coming days. Not Friedmans, not McCains, but days.

There are days when I sincerely wonder how anyone could still be a supporter of the war. For countless reasons, the best that can be said about Iraq today is that the sand is getting plenty of liquid red fertilizer. Not that this will surprise you, but it looks like puppet boy doesn't want to be seen as a puppet anymore.

Privately, however, Maliki criticized what he called the patronizing U.S. tone toward the Iraqi government and warned U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad to respect Iraq's sovereignty, two of the prime minister's advisors said.

"I'm a friend to the United States, but not America's man in Iraq," Maliki told Khalilzad, according to Hassan Senaid, one of the prime minister's closest advisors. Read more…