Left Behind

Not only has George Packer put together a really heartbreaking story for The New Yorker about the bleak fate of Iraqis who've worked with the US military in Iraq, but he also managed to get a pretty inflammatory bit of Bush-bashing our of Richard Armitage that was pretty tangential to the main thread of the piece: "The President believes so firmly that he is President for just this mission—and there’s something religious about it—that it will succeed, and that kind of permeates. I just take him at his word these days. I think it’s very improbable that he’ll be successful."

Packer also notes that as discussed in the Iraq sex post, unlike in Vietnam, American officials in Iraq have relatively little in the way of personal relationships with Iraqis -- just professional ones that tend to be fairly shortlived as people rotate in-and-out of country -- and this makes it relatively unlikely that people will go the extra mile to help people who need helping. And, of course, to help anyone you'd first need to admit that we've faled. And, per Armitage, Bush won't do that.