See, posted Friday, Arthur Silber at The Power of Narrative with Battling the Ghost of Vietnam, which opens with this -

If you want to provoke an especially heated reaction from the supporters of our current foreign policy -- those who proclaim that we must stay in Iraq for the indefinite future, and until an impossible series of events miraculously transforms a bloody, murderous failure into something they might finally dub a "success" - there is one guaranteed method of achieving that end: compare Iraq to Vietnam. Almost without exception, the hawks instantly burn with white-hot anger. Their moral outrage is palpable.

And he goes on to explain, in detail.  It's quite long, and quite good.

Also good, but brief, is this letter a reader sends to Andrew Sullivan at his web log -

Sorting through your blog entries and the readers' emails you've posted yields the following five Iraq options:

(1) If we pull out now, it will be a disaster.

(2) If we keep going indefinitely the way we're going now, it will be a disaster.

(3) If we keep going until January 2009 the way we're going now, the new President will have no choice but to pull out quickly, which will be a disaster.

(4) Have faith that this administration will be more competent from now to January 2009 than it has been so far.

Andrew, I am through putting any faith in this administration. No significant policy they have advanced has turned out like they said it would - the budget, the environment, the cost of Medicare D, torture, WMD, Saddam-Al Qaeda, rebuilding Afghanistan, funding No Child Left Behind, global warming (remember Christine Todd Whitman promising the EPA under Bush would do something about it?), etc. ad nauseam. Have they not practically eliminated funding for civilian rebuilding in Iraq? (Gotta have that estate tax cut.)

How is the military supposed to maintain its present deployment levels for two and a half more years? Stop-loss orders?

One more option:

(5) Have faith that the new Iraqi government will be able to make up for the deficiencies of the Bush administration, if it continues to receive Bush administration help.

Is this faith justified? This seems to me where our inquiry must focus. I confess I don't have enough information to give a reasonable answer, though the reports of rampant corruption and atrocities by people in police and army uniforms are ominous. But we must realize that, if we stay, it's because we have confidence in the new Iraqi government. If we don't have that confidence, we should get out now. We have asked far too much of our military already. If we are to continue stop-loss for two and a half more years, we better have a damn good reason. Faith in the Bush administration is nowhere near good enough.

That's not very cheery.

And see Mark Follman here -

American presidents have long tested the bounds of executive power during wartime. But when it comes to protecting its secrets, the Bush administration has flexed unilateral power to a degree never before seen in U.S. history.

Since 2001, the administration has wielded the "state secrets" privilege as a wide-ranging weapon to snuff out legal challenges to its most Draconian tactics in the global war on terror. At stake are no less than bedrock American moral and legal principles. Bush lawyers have aimed to shoot down court cases involving the indefinite detention and brutal interrogation of prisoners, the covert transfer of terror suspects to foreign governments known to torture, and domestic surveillance prying into the lives of thousands of Americans.

Established by a Supreme Court ruling in 1953, the state secrets privilege allows the executive branch to limit or dismiss court cases that may expose sensitive information and jeopardize national security. To that end, a judge can decide to disallow certain evidence, or even go so far as to quash the whole case, without further remedy in the court system.

When asked, U.S. judges have almost always consented to state secrets claims. But it has come up rarely - just four times in the first 23 years following the 1953 decision. After that, state secrets claims were filed at a fairly even pace during the Cold War and beyond, once or twice per year, under Democratic and Republican presidents alike.

But over the past five years, lawyers representing the Bush administration have asked federal judges to throw out cases entirely at least 21 times - and likely more often than that, according to Meredith Fuchs, the general counsel for the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

… The White House appears to have realized how powerful a tool the state secrets privilege can be, Fuchs says. "There's no question that this administration is using it at a significantly higher rate than any other before it."

But even more than the pace, what now matters is the potency of the tactic, says John Kroger, a professor at Lewis and Clark law school and a former federal prosecutor. "We're seeing a radical departure in how state secrets is being invoked," he says. "We're talking about government actions affecting millions of Americans. We're facing major questions about constitutional law, and the Bush government is saying they can't be adjudicated at all. It's a huge shift in the landscape from how this doctrine has been used in the past."

… In the hands of the Bush administration, the baseline for state secrets is no longer scrubbing a case of sensitive evidence, but wiping the case away completely.

That's worth a read, if you're interested in such things.  There's lots you'll never know.  It's different way of running the government.  Things have changed.

And as the new weeks starts, there's this from Newsweek -  the new national reconciliation plan soon to be announced by Iraq's new Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki.   It calls for a firm US withdrawal plan to be enforced by a United Nations resolution -

The plan also calls for a withdrawal timetable for coalition forces from Iraq, but it doesn't specify an actual date - one of the Sunnis' key demands. It calls for "the necessity of agreeing on a timetable under conditions that take into account the formation of Iraqi armed forces so as to guarantee Iraq's security," and asks that a U.N. Security Council decree confirm the timetable. Mahmoud Othman, a National Assembly member who is close to President Talabani, said that no one disagrees with the concept of a broad, conditions-based timetable.

... [A] senior coalition military official, who agreed to discuss this subject with Newsweek and The Times of London on the condition of anonymity, notably did not outright rule out the idea of a date. "One of the advantages of a timetable - all of a sudden there is a date which is a much more explicit thing than an abstract condition," he said. "That's the sort of assurance that [the Sunnis] are looking for."

"Does that mean the subject of a date is up for negotiation?" he was asked. "I think that if men of goodwill sit down together and exchange ideas, which might be defined either by a timetable or by … sets of conditions, there must be a capacity to find common ground," the official said.

So we've been told setting a withdraw timetable is just plain surrendering and giving up.  But it wouldn't be if they ask for one? 

And we've been told the UN is useless, and a den of thieves and full of incompetents and nations that really should have no say in anything, and Bush bypassed the Senate and appointed that Bolton fellow our ambassador there, the man who said the UN should be destroyed.  But the UN is quite useful and good if the new Iraqi governments says so, and if the UN can save our butt here.

Strange things have been going on in backrooms and in backchannel cables.  Have Iraq's new Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, propose the John Kerry plan for withdrawal so it doesn't seem to have come from the nasty Democrats who hate America, God, and want to murder unborn children and have gays run the joint.

Kevin Drum at The Washington Monthly says this - 

President Bush would be flatly insane to turn this opportunity down. It's precisely the kind of request he needs in order to declare victory, assure everyone that the job is close to done, and make it clear that he respects Iraqi sovereignty and doesn't plan to occupy their country forever. There would be no loss of face and no loss of national honor.

Conversely, if he resists it, it would be hard not to conclude that he was doing so solely because a "broad, conditions-based timetable" also happens to be exactly the position of the vast majority of the Democratic Party - and he would rather chew off his own big toe than do anything that might turn down the volume on the domestic partisan jihad that's been so politically successful for Republicans ever since 9/11. I guess we'll find out soon.

That misses the point.  This was, one suspects, arranged by the administration, and it's pretty clever.  It's manufactured opportunity.

It may be the out.  It may be nothing.