...and the only part of it Bush heard was "in the short term"

That's why he's committed to endless war in Iraq:

Early on the morning of Nov. 13, 2006, members of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group gathered around a dark wooden conference table in the windowless Roosevelt Room of the White House.

For more than an hour, they listened to President Bush give what one panel member called a "Churchillian" vision of "victory" in Iraq and defend the country's prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki. "A constitutional order is emerging," he said.

Later that morning, around the same conference table, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden painted a starkly different picture for members of the study group. Hayden said "the inability of the government to govern seems irreversible," adding that he could not "point to any milestone or checkpoint where we can turn this thing around," according to written records of his briefing and the recollections of six participants.

"The government is unable to govern," Hayden concluded. "We have spent a lot of energy and treasure creating a government that is balanced, and it cannot function."

Later in the interview, he qualified the statement somewhat: "A government that can govern, sustain and defend itself is not achievable," he said, "in the short term."

Hayden's bleak assessment, which came just a week after Republicans had lost control of Congress and Bush had dismissed Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, was a pivotal moment in the study group's intensive examination of the Iraq war, and it helped shape its conclusion in its final report that the situation in Iraq was "grave and deteriorating."

In the eight months since the interview, neither Hayden nor any other high-ranking administration official has publicly described the Iraqi government in the uniformly negative terms that the CIA director used in his closed-door briefing.

This is what happens when you put a delusional, messianic lunatic in the White House. This president was told last November that the so-called Iraqi government was just not up to the task of stabilizing the country -- and has continued to feed American soldiers into the meatgrinder, and plans to continue to feed them into the meatgrinder until he leaves office.

Every Senator and Congressman who has refused to hold this Administration accountable -- every Democrat who has whined "We don't have the votes" and every Republican who has talked the talk and then voted to continue this madness -- every last one of them should be booted out of office in the next election. These men and women are committing murder -- not just the murder of Iraqis, but the murder of our own soldiers -- by continuing to send them into a cause that they know full well is lost. Not one American soldier should have to give his or her life so that a politician can keep his cushy office on Capitol Hill.

The crime of Iraq is primarily on the shoulders of George Bush and Dick Cheney, but every time the Democrats in the House and Senate refuse to meaningfully confront this president -- with articles of impeachment if necessary -- to end this ear, they shoulder ever more of the blame for every death in Iraq.

And if we don't hold their feet to the fire, so do we.