After a much-needed holiday hiatus, I'm back.

How bad does it need to get in Iraq before it's finally labeled a "civil war"? I realize this administration will always opt for taking what is real and then try its darndest to frame it in a fictional way for public consumption.

Just the day after Thanksgiving, car bombings killed over 200 people. I thought Cheney et al said the pre-Nov. 7th violence was purposefully orchestrated to influence our elections, of course implying the mayhem would subside once Election Day passed....? Hmm, go figure.

Many experts have stated that Iraq has been in a civil war (click here, here, here). However, Tony Snow disagrees, stating it's not a civil war since "it's not clear that they are operating as a unified force. You don't have a clearly identifiable leader."

What, like our North vs. South? So if there's no General Lee, then no civil war? These guys are truly nuts.

Meanwhile, Dan Froomkin noticed that Robin Wright wrote in the Washington Post, ""In the history of U.S. foreign policy, there's been nothing like it: a panel outside government trying to bail the United States out of a prolonged and messy war."

Doesn't this "revelation" regarding the Iraq Study Group in and of itself signify Bush's war is a failure? It is indeed Daddy shoving Junior aside, looking to once again bail him out of trouble. Only this time the mess GW made is resulting in thousands upon thousands of deaths not to mention the spending of hundreds of billions of U.S. taxpayer money.

I've written several times here before about how it should never be forgotten how we got into this war to begin with, the lies, the Downing Street memos, the WMD and "yellow cake", etc. etc.

Mark Danner has an excellent take on this:

As the war's presumed ending—constructed from carefully crafted images of triumph, of dictators' statues cast down and presidents striding forcefully across aircraft carrier decks—has flickered and vanished, receding into the just-out-of-grasp future ("a decision for the next president," the pre-election President Bush had said), the war's beginning has likewise melted away, the original rationale obscured in a darkening welter of shifting intelligence, ideological controversy, and conflicting claims, all of it hemmed in now on all sides by the mounting dead.
<..>
The result is that the wave of change the President and his officials were so determined to set in course by unleashing American military power may well turn out to be precisely the wave of Islamic radicalism that they had hoped to prevent.