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I think many observers here (and elsewhere) don’t yet appreciate how bad this will likely get politically.

For example, the way I see it, we've got a Secretary of Defense who's come about as close to criminal negligence as anyone who's held the office since the civil war; someone who not only disregard the advice of his military advisors but publicly humiliated them for differing with his opinions, and as a result entangled us in a ill-planned occupation with somewhere around a third of the troops the professional military believed were required to successfully undertake the occupation even if it had been properly planned.

And that was his level of competence within the scope of his formal responsibilities. In addition, overstepping them, he acted politically (for example) to attempt to create against the consistent advice of his allies and his own state department a government headed by a man who's unvarnished political ambition is now subverting our attempts to somehow untangle ourselves with what honor we can salvage.

Perhaps worst of all from the standpoint of effective support (or even concern) for US troops, when things began to unravel he set the tone for deputies who ordered (and perhaps himself approved)interrogation efforts which resulted ordinary Americans resorting to abuses so horrific that it turns stomachs here and abroad – a problem with repercussions that may only be starting: the reason that organized militaries treat POWs and others under their control humanely is that leadership understands that some of their own troops will likely fall into enemy hands.

Clearly US personnel, especially women, many have forfeited such protection, and our military now operates under the additional handicap of having to make additional and exceptional efforts to prevent the capture of US troops by the insurgents, despite which there is great likelihood this may happen anyway.

In my opinion the inevitable public examination (let alone possible formal investigation) of how we got here will revel something more that the normal operation of incompetence and bad judgment, or the normal reverses and disappointment of war, it will demonstrate that Rumsfeld et al engaged in that amounted to reckless disregard for the lives of US troops, or worse.

And this isn’t something that someone or something else did to the President, or the Republican Party, or the reputation and creditability of conservatives; it's a self-inflicted wound, a ongoing nightmare inflicted by a willingness to be lead into an unnecessary war by a cadre of what are now reveled as self-deluded dreamers - men and women who are now insisting that the rest of pick up the check least onlookers realize that they are bankrupt – and bankrupting the rest of us in the process.