Recently in a throw-(not throe-)up-your-hands mode, Army Brig. Gen. Karl Horst, deputy commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, which oversees Baghdad, offered the following, taking credit for having predicted the very throe his troops were then engulfed in: "If you look at the past few months, insurgents have not been able to sustain attacks, but they tend to surge every four weeks or so. We are right in the middle of one of those periods and predicted this would come... If they are going to influence the constitution process, they have only a few days left to do it, and we fully expect the attacks to continue."

You would think that someone in an official capacity would conclude, sooner or later, that Iraq was a spike in violence.

It's an accepted truth of our times that the Bush administration has been the most secretive, disciplined, and on-message administration in our history. So what an out-of-control couple of weeks for the President and his pals! His polls were at, or near, historic lows; his Iraq War approval numbers headed for, or dipping below, 40% -- and polls are, after all, the message boards for much of what's left of American democracy. As he was preparing for his record-setting Presidential vacation in Crawford, George and his advisors couldn't even agree on whether we were in a "global struggle with violent extremism" or in a Global War on Terror. (The President finally opted for war.) He was, of course, leaving behind in Washington a Special Counsel, called into being by his administration but now beyond its control, who held a sword of judicial Damocles over key presidential aides (and who can probably parse sinking presidential polls as well as anyone).

Iraq -- you can't leave home without it -- has, of course, been at the heart of everything Bushworld hasn't been able to shake off at least since May 2, 2003. On that day (when, ominously enough, 7 American soldiers were wounded by a grenade attack in Fallujah), our President co-piloted a jet onto the USS Abraham Lincoln, an aircraft carrier halted off the San Diego coast (lest it dock and he only be able to walk on board). All togged out in a military uniform, he declared "major combat operations" at an end, while standing under a White House-produced banner reading "mission accomplished." Ever since then, George has been on that mission (un)accomplished and Iraq has proved nothing if not a black hole, sucking in his administration and the American military along with neocon dreams and plans of every ambitious sort.

The Iraqi insurgency that should never have happened, or should at least have died down after unknown thousands of its foot soldiers were killed or imprisoned by the American military, inconveniently managed to turn the early days of August into a killing zone for American soldiers. Sixteen Marine Reservists from a single unit in Ohio were killed in a couple of days; 7 soldiers from the Pennsylvania National Guard were killed, again in a few days. Thirty-seven Americans were reported to have died in Iraq in the first 11 days of the presidential vacation, putting American casualties at the top of the TV news night after night. And yet the administration has seemed capable only of standing by helplessly, refusing to give an inch on the "compassion" President's decision -- he and his advisors are still navigating by the anti-Vietnam playbook -- not to visit grief-stricken communities in either Ohio or Pennsylvania, or ever to be caught attending the funeral of one of the boys or girls he sent abroad to die. He did manage, however, to fly to the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico to sign the energy bill and also left his ranch to hobnob with millionaire Republican donors.

In this same period, cracks in relations between an increasingly angry military command in Iraq and administration officials back in Washington began to appear for all to see. The issue, for desperate military officers, was – as for Cindy Sheehan -- how in the world to get our troops out of Iraq before the all-volunteer military went over an Iraqi cliff, wheels and all.

As July ended, our top general in Iraq, George W. Casey, announced (with many conditional "ifs") that we should be able to start drawing-down American troops significantly by the following spring -- that tens of thousands of them were likely to leave then and tens of thousands more by the end of 2006, and Don Rumsfeld initially backed him up somewhat edgily. Then, as Rumsfeld hedged, more military people jumped into the media fray with leaks and comments of all sorts about possible Iraqi drawdowns and there was a sudden squall of front-page articles on withdrawal strategies for a hard-pressed administration in an increasingly unpopular war. At the same time, confusingly, reports began to surface indicating that, because of another of those prospective "spikes" in violence, the administration would actually be increasing American troop strength in Iraq before the December elections by 10,000-20,000 soldiers.

Finally, after a war council of the Rumsfeld and Rice (Pentagon and State Department) "teams" in Crawford last week, the President held a press conference (devoted in part to responding to Cindy Sheehan) and promptly launched a new, ad-style near-jingle to explain the withdrawal moment to the American people: "As Iraqis stand up," he intoned, "we will stand down."

But in a week in which the American general in command of transportation in Iraq announced that roadside bomb attacks against his convoys had doubled over the past year, such words sounded empty -- especially as news flowed in suggesting that, while the insurgents continued to fight fiercely, the new Iraqi military seemed in no rush whatsoever to "stand up" and that our own commanders believed it might never do so in significant numbers. At his news conference, our never-never-land President nonetheless spoke several times of being pleased to announce "progress" in Iraq. ("And we're making progress training the Iraqis. Oh, I know it's hard for some Americans to see that progress, but we are making progress.")

He spoke as well of attempts to ease the burden on the no-longer-weekend warriors of the National Guard and the Reserves (who are taking unprecedented casualties in August). He said: "We've also taken steps to improve the call-up process for our Guard and for our Reserves. We've provided them with earlier notifications. We've given them greater certainty about the length of their tours. We minimized the number of extensions and repeat mobilizations." Unfortunately, at just this moment, Joint Chiefs head Myers was speaking of the possibility of calling soldiers back for their third tours of duty in Iraq: "There's the possibility of people going back for a third term, sure. That's always out there. We are at war."