Summary here and here and here and here.

The cat’s not just out of the bag; the bag has rotted to dust and the cat has gone through all nine lives.

…This administration has been orchestrating a foreign policy disaster of epic proportions… Article

Editorial du jour:

Bush talks nonsense about situation in Iraq
His pronouncements now bear no resemblance to reality. Article

Related:

…as the summit meeting between President Bush and Prime Minister Kamal Nuri al-Maliki of Iraq concluded Thursday morning, the Arab world was left dumbfounded that nothing had come of it.

“I am baffled by what I saw,” said Abdel Moneim Said, director of the Ahram Center for Strategic Studies in Cairo. “This was an expression of the Americans in deep trouble, but Bush’s approach to dealing with the Iraqi problem also bore the signs of someone out of touch with what is going on.” Article

Also:

Even if Sana al-Nabhani had cared about the summit meeting in Jordan on Thursday between Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and President Bush, she would not have been able to watch the news. As usual, Iraqis went without electricity from the national grid for most of the day and she could not find any gasoline to run her personal generator.

Told by a reporter later in the day about the meeting’s outcome, Ms. Nabhani, a 34-year-old homemaker, scoffed: “Is that all? Was that even worth the fuel consumed by their airplanes?” Article

Until such time (hint: never) the woebegone G. Walker administration learns and internalizes the difference between negotiations and ultimatums and adopts and promulgates that vital lesson, even elementray and incremental progress is ineffably stymied.

The Bush administration is deliberating whether to abandon U.S. reconciliation efforts with Sunni insurgents and instead give priority to Shiites and Kurds, who won elections and now dominate the government, according to U.S. officials.

The proposal, put forward by the State Department as part of a crash White House review of Iraq policy, follows an assessment that the ambitious U.S. outreach to Sunni dissidents has failed. U.S. officials are increasingly concerned that their reconciliation efforts may even have backfired, alienating the Shiite majority and leaving the United States vulnerable to having no allies in Iraq, according to sources familiar with the State Department proposal. Article

Granted, the full report has not yet been released. However, the harbingers are less and less propitious, indeed even indicative of a descent into the toothless shallows of vagueness and lickspittle doublespeak, kicking the can down the road yet further.

Even before its release, a high-profile advisory panel’s report on U.S. policy alternatives in Iraq is generating much excitement but some worry that its main recommendations will fall short of expectations and may be ignored by President George W. Bush. Article

Look, attempting to “compromise solutions” for one party in a hot war is ludicrous.

Either it is going down the drain (and it is) or it is not. There is no splitting the difference. Tinkering ’round the edges and taking a wait and see posture is indistinguishable from current, harmful policy and Tinkerbell caveats. There is no partiality of outcome. The earth is not planted with the partially dead nor with any expired by consensus as a result of the horror and errors compounded upon errors of the woebegone G. Walker administration.

The cold slap of candor.

A senior American official has spoken of “the myth of the special relationship” between the United States and Britain, arguing that Tony Blair got “nothing, no payback” for supporting President George W Bush in Iraq.

[snip]

In candid comments that will embarrass Mr Bush and Mr Blair, the veteran official said America “ignored” Britain, and he urged Britain to decouple itself from the US.

He asserted that the “special relationship”, a term coined by Sir Winston Churchill in 1946, gave Britain little or nothing.

“It has been, from the very beginning, very one-sided. There never really has been a special relationship, or at least not one we’ve noticed.”

[snip]

The Bush administration took little account of what Britain said, Mr Myers said. “We typically ignore them and take no notice. We say, ‘There are the Brits coming to tell us how to run our empire. Let’s park them’. It is a sad business and I don’t think it does them justice.”

[snip]

Mr Myers, a senior analyst with the State Department’s Bureau of Analysis and Research, was speaking in a lecture in Washington at the School of Advanced International Studies, part of Johns Hopkins University. Article

Related:

The State Department repudiated on Thursday comments by a veteran department analyst who said that British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s relationship with the United States was “totally one-sided” in Washington’s favor.

Deputy spokesman Tom Casey said that Kendall Myers, the official who made the off-message remarks, was summoned by his superiors at the Bureau of Intelligence and Research to a meeting to explain his remarks. Article