One of the key pieces that made the Constitution of 1787 work was the obvious choice of George Washington as the first President under the new arrangements. Before then, the articles of Confederation had no clear place for his stature and desire for executive authority. A clear choice for first executive is not always a benefit - it is easy to point to nations who elected their liberator as first executive, and then spent 20 years suffering under him. However, the absence of any qualifiers of the stature needed to lead Iraq is a good indicator that the US wasn't liberating Iraq, but occupying it, and hoping for the best.

Those of you who read the Washington Post this morning may have noticed two articles that trace the linkage between the failure of political will in Iraq, and the failing political fortunes of George W. Bush. Iraq's government stalemate drags on with no government months after the "elections". At the same time the Post notices what several bloggers have for months Bush's falling poll numbers are coast to coast, as even states that gave Bush a healthy majority of votes, now disapprove of his job.

It is a sign of how the Iraq misadventure is closing in from all sides. Even the Shia cannot pick a leader among their own, even retired generals - as close to a "base" as Bush has - are now complaining about how the war in Iraq has been waged. Korea ended Truman's hope for a third term, and Vietnam LBJ's hopes of a second full term. Iraq is now fracturing the Republican Party into its two real wings: the nativists, and the expansionists. Both are joined by hatred of "liberals", but they have a fundamental discontinuity in their world views. Iraq is pressuring this discontinuity.

The AP reports on how the United States government is building a fortress embassy. This is in addition to permanent bases means that the neo-conservative dream is being pursued to the, very bitter, end. The 'phants clearly hope that distractions such as Iran and immigration will create enough of a cloud to prevent America from focusing on the question that ought to be the centerpiece of debate in an election year - namely our continued policy in the single largest government action in recent memory. As with deficit reduction in Clinton, Iraq defines the entire record of George Bush, it was the source of funds that was to carry through his radical social engineering project, which would change the source of the America economy permanently to a colonial and mercantile basis.

That these two regimes are paralyzed, and simply hoping that mere tenure will secure their permanence, indicates that there is something wrong with the project more than theory, more than the execution of the details of attack, more than the failure of vision. Instead it suggest that, fundamentally, the fragmentation which is now being exposed was there all along, and was blithely ignored. This disconnect from the reality of people, papered over by a compliant media, a complacent public, and a seemingly bottomless well of credit from China and Japan - is the crucial failure of the entire decade that we now live. This war without victory in a decade without a name failed, not because it did not work, but because it could not work. There was, in the end, a failed idea, a twisted dream that has covered the middle east with blood and left it in a semi-permanent state of blitzkrieg.

But the same fragmentation leaves no clear alternative: Iraq clearly would not be better off under the rebels. And while the Democrats need do only slightly better than the 20th century average of second term elections to retake the Senate, and could, if given enough of a wave of anger and resentment, retake the House of Representatives - they have not shown the ability to control the debate, frame the questions to their advantage, nor offer much of an alternative other than "we won't make the mistake that we supported shoulder to shoulder." With a party core that is still pro-war, even as the party base has become rancidly angry at anything that reeks of Iraq, with a party core that is economically conservative, even as the party base is pushing for universal single payer health care, with a party core that is spending its time in internal feuds, even as the party base wants, more than anything unity - the Democrats are also victims of the fundamental disconnect. 40% of Democrats want Hillary for President, and yet Hillary's positions on almost every issue are far to the right of the party base. Indeed if the likely match up of McCain-Clinton occurs, an anti-war country will have two strongly pro-war choices on the ballot, it is a recipe for a third party run that represents the position that most Americans now take - the war is, and always was, a bad idea.

The Republicans thought they were electing Reagan, who would talk tough, but move carefully, they got, instead, a kind of anti-Christ LBJ. The Democratic rank and file may find out, sooner than they like, that the hope for a return of William Jefferson Clinton, and instead are supporting a Goldwater Girl who hasn't forgotten her political roots.