From the inside. Beware the Ides of (November?):

Damn Their Eyes:

Bush's presidency has reeled from - the political catastrophe in Florida where he lost the election of 2000 before John Roberts and Jim Baker rigged the Supreme Court decision - to the national catastrophe on 9/11. From there, Bush fabricated a series of crises from Afghanistan to Iraq and Iran to terrorize his own people into voting for him in 2004. After demonizing the weak and militarily impotent nations he deemed to be vile as the `Axis of Evil,' that very `Axis of Evil' struck back in 2006 with a devastating military and political defeat for Bush's puppet state of Israel in their ill-conceived war against Hezbollah. That shocking defeat was swiftly followed by a nuclear blast from North Korea.

Those two events weakened Bush's presidency to the point that senior members of his own party swiftly stepped in to sever his reins to real political power. Jim Baker, Colin Powell and Brent Scowcroft have been very busy deconstructing Bush and Cheney's diabolical plans to launch World War W by attacking Iran this autumn. The Iran War was to be the crowning glory of the neoconservative campaign in the midterm elections, but Baker, Powell and Scowcroft seized the moment of North Korea's nuclear explosion to force Bush, Cheney and their loyal neoconservative legions to release their grips on the reins of American political power. Ranking Republicans want a return to the calm waters of rationality, and they have begun the painful process by telling the press, "Iraq is lost."

With their belligerent rhetoric now torn and tattered, the Bush-Cheney White House faces a political holocaust next Tuesday. American voters are incendiary with anger at the Bush-Cheney White House. By a majority of two to one, American voters are opposed to the war in Iraq. A volcanic eruption of political dynamite will explode next Tuesday triggering an earthquake in American history. The seismic proportions will be gigantic, and the tectonic shifts will relegate neoconservativism - as it has been known and practiced by Bush and Cheney - to a grotesque exhibit in the museum of political insanity.
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America's global reputation as a democratic society lies in ruins. Worse. The American press and media are now ranked 53rd on the Worldwide Press Freedom Index. This decline in status is nothing less than a disgrace, for the United States of America is tied in a dead heat with three other countries: Botswana, Croatia and Tonga - for even that dubious distinction.

The struggle within the US power structure between the economic empire builders (EEB) and the civilian militarists/Zioncons over US Middle East and global policy is now out in the open and intensifying.  The EEB now have a politically powerful organizational expression, the Baker Commission (known officially as the Iraq Study Group) led by the formidable former Secretary of State, James Baker.  The EEB are backed by a group of bipartisan congressional leaders, sectors of the traditional military elite, a powerful coalition of Texas-based oil and gas groups and sectors of Wall Street financial houses and potentially a large majority of public opinion.  
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The elite divisions in an around the Administration are coming to the fore:  Alberto Fernandez, Director of Public Diplomacy at the State Department Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs publicly denounced US `arrogance and stupidity in Iraq' right after Bush came out for `staying the course'.  Richard Armitage, Deputy Secretary of State from 2001-2005, came out for a `phased withdrawal of US forces in Iraq'.