It's September

Indeed it is.

The liberal blogosphere is second guessing itself on the apparent changes in Washington's conventional wisdom, wondering if it could have done something different anticipating the shifting sands on Iraq:

Funny thing is, it was all predicted.

As predicted by almost anyone with a brain and who has been watching Washington, the CW seems to be moving in the White House's favor on Iraq. Some are attributing it to a brilliant PR campaign by Petraeus.

I think this is ridiculous.

You can only be persuaded if you want to be persuaded. Republicans have a whole lot of reasons to be seduced into believing the bullshit coming out of the White House and Pentagon. So do many Democrats. For that matter, a whole lot of the American public wants to believe as well. Who in their right mind wants to believe that the U.S. in Iraq is a waste of time? What American wants international failure? Who wants to think that the deaths, casualties and mayhem have been for nothing?

The answer is no one.

The only question is whether or not Bush has used up all his chits. Clearly, and in reality, he has and obviously there are a whole lot of people who don't trust him at all. In a rational world, the war would be over.

But we don't live in a rational world.

The real battle will be between our desire to believe, and our experience of being punked. I know where I come down and it's been clear for years that we are going to lose in Iraq. But I'm not so sure that most of our leadership, who supported the war in the first place, aren't ripe for continued punking because of their own self-deception and ego's. The leaks about Harry Reids negotiations with Republicans seem to support the punking. And the ever compliant media is eating it up. In the end, it just may feel better for our leaders to pretend rather than face the reality, to become Bush's three-card-monty victim yet again rather than deal with the pain.

That's where it looks like it's headed to me. As predicted.

And what's even scarrier? Like a mirror image of the end of the Vietnam war, the Democrats are extremely vulnerable to continuing the war after the 2008 elections:

Mearsheimer argued that Iraq has been and will continue to be a disaster, but that because of domestic politics and institutional dynamics we'll still be there in five years and beyond. The stab-in-the-back narrative that's being prepared by the Republican Party will succeed in scaring a Democratic president and Democratic congress from taking any decisive steps to end the war. At the same time, the senior theater leadership in the armed forces are committed to not losing, due to their perception of the institutional disaster that resulted from the Vietnam War.

I hope he's wrong, I fear he's right.