The Devil is in the details...

...but the whole damn thing has gone to Hell.

Juan Cole points out the problem with the particular...

It seems likely, however, that the Fallujah offensive has so deeply alienated the Sunni Arab populace of Iraq, which is probably 4 million to 4.5 million strong, that it has ensured that they will boycott the polls as American-sponsored. The political goals of the Fallujah campaign, in other words, were foredoomed to failure...

...but James Wolcott casts the net a bit wider.

Andrew Sullivan and Thomas Friedman can petition for more troops all they please. It's too late for more troops. We don't have troops to spare as it is, but even if we did, it's too late. It's too late for everything. The blundering mistakes that were made in the first days and weeks of the occupation can't be reversed now--they're incorrectible. The window of opportunity dropped like a guillotine while Donald Rumsfeld was regaling the press corps with his pithy wisdom.

They're both right, of course. Fallujah is anything but a victory, since there was never a question about our ability to assemble enough force to overrun the city. The only practical reasons for doing so, though, were to gain some larger political advantage, and that job has been botched irretrievably.

It's just a recapitulation, though, of the overall mess we've made in Iraq. Our ability to drive to Baghdad with an intensive armored attack supported by artillery and air support is hardly a remarkable achievement for the most powerful military power on the planet. The way we chose to do it, though, has left us with in a quagmire of our own making, the inevitable and totally predictable result of Rummy's indefensible battle plan.

I've been generally sympathetic to the view that we made the mess and we have some obligation to clean it up. The fact is, though, that we seem to break everything we touch in Iraq. We've sent a demolition crew to provide maid service and we're seemingly astonished that they're ill equipped for the job.

It's time to stop the insanity. It's taken a while to get there (arguably too long) but count me in with the "Out Now" crowd. We've sacrificed 1217 American lives to George and Rummy's false idol already. We're bound to lose more even if withdrawal started today.

And how do you ask someone to be the last one to die for a mistake?