No matter what Petraeus says today about one brigade coming out early next year or not, by September many if not most brigades will be pulling back to Kuwait and the long sail home.   The Army simply can’t sustain the surge without breaking, period.  Even Pace knows this.

Sometimes retreats are disasters, sometimes not. Few expect this one to be akin to those Great Historical calamities, at least in immediate terms — although a fighting retreat is not ruled out.

The long term implications may be as bad if not cataclysmic. Yet Bin Laden’s throw of the dice is that he can wave a red cape and keep the Warlord impaling himself and American power on the Iraqi Tree of Thorns. That Bin Laden’s speech echoed so many Democrat themes the perfect goad. How well our enemy understands us, how ignorant and unwise we.

A Democratic majority has not forced a withdrawal to the understandable bewilderment and rage of their base. Still, they stopped in no small way the larger danger posed by the Administration — the destruction of liberal democracy here at home. Not completely — as made clear by the FISA cave in. But better than the unified government. That, to the Stiftung was always the larger peril, the war merely the most obvious.

So don’t expect alot of comment here in the days and weeks ahead about Petreaus, the blahs over this or that, etc. It’s all smoke and mirrors to the Stiftung. Our troops are going to start coming home, Dear Reader, in 2008. One way or another.

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