Enframing the new Campaign Against Violent Extremism

This Washington Post article has to be read: US Lowers Sights on What Can Be Achieved in Iraq. It's just too precious. Infuriating, rather. "Oops, sorry everybody got killed and wounded and fraternity hazed and all that." But at least they're unstupidizing a little bit. (And, by the way, the war was not justified to the American people as a humanitarian war of liberation).

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."