Now, I’m not the biggest fan of Henry Nixon-and-Vietnam Kissinger, but I do concede he’s a brilliant man. So I tend to take this take on the odds of victory in Iraq to be worth my consideration.

“If you mean by ‘military victory’ an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don’t believe that is possible,” he told the British Broadcasting Corp.

But Kissinger, an architect of the Vietnam war who has advised President Bush about Iraq, warned against a rapid withdrawal of coalition troops, saying it could destabilize Iraq’s neighbors and cause a long-lasting conflict.”

A dramatic collapse of Iraq - whatever we think about how the situation was created - would have disastrous consequences for which we would pay for many years and which would bring us back, one way or another, into the region,” he said.

And there we see the true disaster this Iraq War has become. Not only is it impossible to win at this point, but we can’t leave without the country falling apart. To use a terrible, terribly overused pun, we are truly between a rock (Iraq) and a hard place. It’s a scary thought that where we’re at may be the best we can hope for in the area any time soon.

So now it’s going to come down to the Democrats. They have to deal with what may be considered the most bungled war in America’s history, beyond Vietnam even, and they have to make it work or they will be politically decimated in 2008. Maybe that was the plan all along: republicans knew it was a failure and let the Dems take the fall.

That’s a little paranoid for me, though.