According to a senior administration official (yes, the Bush administration) who has been involved in policy since the 2003 invasion (that should be clue enough to figure out who this official is) the U.S. policy (if you can dignify the hit and miss efforts as policy) in Iraq was unrealistic from the beginning.

What was intended to bring enlightenment to the benighted heathens and be a beacon of U.S.-style democracy in the darkness of Islamic feudalism will now be subject to lowered expectations. Sorry, Charles Dickens; roll over. The U.S. will have to settle for far less progress than the boasting would have led you to believe was possible. Not only possible; imminent Notice the continued use of "progress" and all that the word implies.

We heard chest-thumping self-congratulatory boasts of a model new democracy, a self-supporting oil industry or a society in which the majority of Iraqi people would be free from serious security or economic challenges. How many more are dead since the proclaimed "Mission Accomplished"? Is the country's infrastructure in place and secure? Schools and hospitals? Freedom from fear and want?

The senior official admitted that the expectations were never realistic. Not great expectations, but greatly overblown expectations uttered for home consumption and political expediency, say I. Now the unrealistic expectations will be shed and the goal readjusted says that official.

And for how many more years will we suffer the effects of the actions/inactions taken by this baboon and his puppet masters, O Lord?