At the rate the situation is deteriorating, there is little doubt in my mind that the US military is going to pull out of Iraq in a hurry, most likely sometime in the next year or so.  The only question I'm entertaining is "under what conditions".

It's not outside the realm of possibility (sadly, I think it's well within that realm) that Bushie's insistence on keeping US troops in Iraq will result in either a precipitous dash for the Kuwaiti (or Jordanian or Saudi or Turkish) border, with the attendant huge (further) losses of life and equipment or, worse, Bushie insisting on the troops standing and fighting.

The latter will result in three things:  (1) a debacle 500 or 1000 times worse than Custer and his Last Stand, (2) mass killing of Iraqis, innocent or not, and (3) Limbaugh's rants yesterday to the effect of "kill them all" becoming policy.  Bushie and his fundies have been looking for the opportunity to have their Armageddon (funny, how we haven't heard that word in the MSM for a long time now, no?) and, if his policy continues unchecked, they're angling to get it.

They've been stroking their nuclear trigger for a while, and I wouldn't be surprised if and when they find a way to use it.

Every fundie ideologue - and that includes Bushie - has a certain set of attributes:  

the sure knowledge that they are the recipient of Unvarnished Truth and that all others who disagree in the slightest are not only Wrong but also Evil;  
the incapacity to recognize error in their own actions and policies and adjust to rectify error;  
the sure belief that, those lucky dice rolls in the beginning (when they took a chance and got away with it) were not the result of luck, but rather were the result of only their innate superiority in knowledge, intuition, favor of the God(s) and destiny;
when all goes to crap, the sure knowledge that the common folks just weren't worthy of them;  
the lack of perspective for the likely results of their actions; and
rather than lose, they'll go for the Gotterdaemmerung every time.

In reality, there's not a lot which separates them from people who need their medication to act within the bounds of civilized society.  

Gates Pushed for Bombing of Sandinistas
His 1984 memo called for 'hard measures' against Nicaragua.
WASHINGTON -- Robert M. Gates, President Bush's nominee to lead the Pentagon, advocated a bombing campaign against Nicaragua in 1984 in order to "bring down" the leftist government, according to a declassified memo released by a nonprofit research group.

Any conciliatory words or moves from this administration are smoke and mirrors I think, designed to divert attention from hidden agendas.

They are just retrenching and rebuilding and waiting for the right opportunity. With Robert Gates they are the same bums dressed up in new cheap suit. It will look good for awhile, but won't last very long.

Michael Klare: Bush Goes Over to Imperial Defense

Cheney and Rumsfeld thought that there was endless stretch to imperial overstretch and, as a result, managed to push American power (military and economic) so hard in the service of their dreams of global dominion that the actual imperial might of the United States began to crack and give way under the strain. Gates is all too aware of the vulnerabilities this opens up -- like a football coach whose team has suddenly found itself deep in its own territory. That's the moment, of course, when you need to pay closer attention to your adversaries; you need to psych out their strategies and tactics; you have to be able to play defense and give up some yards when endless blitzes of the other team's quarterback prove futile; you have to establish fall-back positions you can hold onto. Rumsfeld could never master those skills; Gates, with his long experience in the intelligence community, already has. It is for this reason, more than any other, that he was chosen at this pivotal moment in American history.

It is too early to foresee what particular course Gates and his soon-to-be-selected associates will adopt in their effort to refashion American strategy in light of current international realities. But any notion of emerging triumphant from Iraq will now be abandoned, and the search will be on for a strategy that would allow the United States to extricate itself from the Iraqi morass while retaining its dominant position in the greater Persian Gulf region. This has become the overarching objective.

I've been reading a lot about Islam and these people are crazy

Yeah, yeah, I've heard just about every racial generalization I ever want to hear, thanks. You're not adding anything new to the mix with statements comparable to: "Them nig*ers are all shiftless and lazy".

Keep reading. Wait, better yet, STOP reading. Turn off your computer for awhile. Go outside and start meeting and talking to people. Go to the nearest mosque. Make some friends. Or aquaintances if you can't bring yourself to make some friends.

If the people you meet make you nervous the place to start looking for answers is inside yourself.

You also spew a great deal of hateful speech that does nothing to further intelligent debate.

You also keep disturbingly referring to "these people" as if they were a single monolithic block all irrevocably locked into a single irrefutable ideology. This is sheer nonsense.

And you keep citing the "Koran" without saying whose translation of that book you are using, their qualifications as translators, or whether you are reading the original Arabic text.

Without this information no credence can be lent to either the alleged "quotes" OR your or somebody else's interpretation of the cited quote.

Hate speech, plain and simple, and YOU complain about Muslims.

45 minutes ago - Boston Herald

It's my blog, but why isn't anyone else on the left SCREAMING this?