Lowered Expectations

The Bush administration is significantly lowering expectations of what can be achieved in Iraq, recognizing that the United States will have to settle for far less progress than originally envisioned during the transition due to end in four months, according to U.S. officials in Washington and Baghdad.

The United States no longer expects to see a model new democracy, a self-supporting oil industry or a society in which the majority of people are free from serious security or economic challenges, U.S. officials say.

"What we expected to achieve was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground," said a senior official involved in policy since the 2003 invasion. "We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we're in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning."

The Left has been aware of the impossibilities of this war from the start. The Right needs to do their business of selling this new thinking to the Right- they need to make their keyboard cronies and talkradio nuts aware that they took us to war with unrealistic perceptions. They have to do that work among the American culture - or rather, it is their duty to do it.

They won't though, because it's not politically viable. And we won't hear Bush make this declaration, or his staff, even though it clearly has become part of the thinking of The Administration. make no mistake- they're fully aware that they have gotten this country into a war which will never fulfill the needs they expected. They were the dreamers, looking at the clouds and seeing dollar bills and Constitutions over the near East.