Matt Taibbi: [1]

We may soon have to face this fact: With the midterm elections over, and George Bush already a lame duck, the Iraq war is no longer an urgent problem to anyone on the Hill who matters. The Democrats are in no hurry to end things because it will benefit them if Iraq is still a mess in '08; just as they did this fall, they'll bitch about the war without explicitly promising to end it at any particular time. George Bush has already run his last campaign and he's not about to voluntarily fuck up his legacy with a premature surrender or a humiliating concession to Syria or Iran. At least publicly, John McCain is going to head into '08 siding with those in the military who believe the problem is a lack of troops.

For the Iraq disaster to end, someone among these actors is going to have to make a difficult decision -- admit defeat, invite a bloody civil war, lose face before a pair of rogue terror-supporting states -- and it's obvious that none of them is ever going to do that, not until there's absolutely no choice.

Matt's larger analysis of how Washington works is both sad and all too true. There are no votes to be earned or lobbyists' checks to be cashed, as far as most politicians are concerned, by solving real problems. They are, by and large insulated from the consequences of their actions. Nobody most of them know are dying in Iraq. (There's a reason why Webb is one of the few Senators whose anger at Bush seems real, his son't life is on the line, and he knows other people in Iraq.)

Unfortunately for all these guys, the situation in Iraq is just going to get worse and worse, and at some point there's a decent chance that one of the factions is going to crack the Green Zone and the US army is going to have to do a fighting retreat. And it is going to be a complete clusterfuck, because the US does not have good control over the road network. Even if the US manages to hunker down in its network of fortresses and lives with the steady attrition, a couple more years of this fiasco will probably kill another half million Iraqis, maybe much more. (It's true that leaving may precipitate a blood bath that kills just as many. It's also clear that staying just prolongs the agony.)

There comes a point where the unwillingness to actually deal with a problem because of political calcuation moves from "business as usual", past "moral cowardice" and into the category of a crime against humanity. That point is very close - Democrats now have their majorities; if they fail to use them to end the war, then they must take responsibility for every single death caused by the war from January on.

Go read Matt, he says a lot of things very well which need to be heard and truly understood.