Game Over?

Frank Rich, writing in tommorow's New York Times thinks it's already game over in Iraq.
LIKE the Japanese soldier marooned on an island for years after V-J Day, President Bush may be the last person in the country to learn that for Americans, if not Iraqis, the war in Iraq is over.
As if.

His point seems to be that support for the war is collapsing, but like Mr. Cheney's "last throes" of the insurrgency, this war can go on a lot longer. There is a lot of wishful thinking in going from the unpopularity of the war to ending it.
A Bush loyalist, Senator George Allen of Virginia, instructed the president to meet with Cindy Sheehan, the mother camping out in Crawford, as "a matter of courtesy and decency." Or, to translate his Washingtonese, as a matter of politics. Only someone as adrift from reality as Mr. Bush would need to be told that a vacationing president can't win a standoff with a grief-stricken parent commandeering TV cameras and the blogosphere 24/7.
Rich sees withdrawal coming.
The endgame for American involvement in Iraq will be of a piece with the rest of this sorry history. ... Officially this calendar is tied to the next round of Iraqi elections, but it's quite another election this administration has in mind. The priority now is less to save Jessica Lynch (or Iraqi democracy) than to save Rick Santorum and every other endangered Republican facing voters in November 2006.
In the meanwhile, Americans and Iraqis will continue to be killed and wounded, and extrication will be neither easy nor painless.

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