Surrender!

(h/t: japandrew. image: Doug Mills/The New York Times. Washington. May 22, 2007. nytimes.com)

Did they surrender, throw in the towel, give up, roll-over, faint, collapse, capitulate, or WHAT?! Do you believe that withdrawing the time-table for deployment from Iraq was a "win" for the Dems, as Harry Reid implies? That they now have Bush on the run? Didn't they have a mandate? Does anyone but Russ Feingold feel betrayed? They say we need 11 more votes to make the withdrawal stick. How could that be?

On other fronts, there are reports that everyone, the US and Iraq, is planning for withdrawal. Toby Dodge, an Iraq expert at the University of London and author of Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation-Building and a History Denied, gave a recent interview in which he seemed pretty pessimistic about current plans working out. Replying to a question about the moment when the US embassy personnel will need to be evacuated by helicopter from Baghdad, he advised that the architects of the US embassy give it "a large roof." This is a good indication of the possibilities of the "surge" and now the "2nd surge" succeeding.