Yesterday's Daily Kos contained a diary by ademption featuring a recent interview between Sy Hersh and Wolf Blitzer discussing Hersh's latest New Yorker article. Hersh's sources are telling him that Bush plans to pull most of our troops out of Iraq next year and step up air support for the Iraqi troops. That this would ultimately lead to Iraqis selecting targets for American bombers and tactical aircraft is causing the Pentagon "great unease" due to the penetration of the Iraqi army by the militias and the insurgency. The Iraqis calling in strikes could just as easily use America's vast air power to eliminate their political opponents as to use it against insurgents. Hersh said that our military leaders, frustrated that they cannot convey their objections to the president, have been talking with other people in government, like Representative John Murtha (D-OH), in an effort to influence national policy.

Ademption points out that this sounds a lot like "Vietnamization" during the Nixon years, designed to beef up the South Vietnamese troops and reduce American casualties. It also is reminiscent of Nixon's gradual detachment from reality shortly before Congress would have voted to impeach. The latter parallel is not exact, since the Bush administration decided to abandon a "reality-based" approach to policy years ago, whereas Nixon's unhappy condition at the end was an aberration from a very realistic, if immoral, political philosophy. Our present posture, however, is for that reason far more alarming; a national policy based on anything other than reality makes this administration a hazard not only to the United States, but, in a nuclear age, to the entire world.