Happy First Blogiversary to Whiskey Bar - and don't miss Billmon's latest analysis of Iraq, Countdown to Failure.

I suppose it's a natural human response: eye for any eye, atrocity for atrocity. But I still find it amazing that the progressive collapse of every single justification offered for this war -- the nonexistent WMDs, Saddam's mythical connection to Al Qaeda, the craving of the Iraqi people for Western-style bourgeois democracy and Big Macs -- has had so little effect on the willingness of the American people to keep fighting it.

....the events of the past week have probably doomed whatever slender chance existed for stabilizing Iraq in the post-June 30 period. It looks like the Coalition is on a countdown to political failure. And political failure will eventually mean military failure as well, since it's hard to see how public support for an indefinite occupation can be maintained indefinitely. ...The only remaining question, it seems, is how much more blood will have to be spilled -- in Iraq, and maybe in America as well -- before the price of that failure has been paid in full.