Juan Cole has a sobering take at his site today about the Petraeus hearings. The upshot is that while Petraeus's shot at success of any sort in Iraq (let's call it a general cooling of ethnic tensions and mass violence) is a very long shot, Dems should want to let him continue trying. And that for the following reasons ...

Given the stabilization of Republican support for the war, there's not a lot Democrats can do to force the president to end the war during his term. Even if you assume heroic budgetary battles, there's just not enough time left. Even the most aggressive timetables for withdrawal would take upwards of a year to execute. And Bush is down to 18 months.

Add to that the fact that Cole believes that all hell really will break loose once US troops leave -- a not improbable assumption. And you come up with the conclusion that a Democratic president comes into office in early 2009 just in time to oversee Iraq's descent into anarchy.

Not that it's not pretty anarchic already. It's just that a lot of chaos we've sown will only be fully realized when we leave -- somewhat like you don't fully realize or lock in investment losses until you have to sell the stocks or other assets at fractions of what you bought them for. Until then you can always pretend the value is going to rebound.

I'm not sure I fully agree with Juan about the implicit assumptions about how the domestic US politics play out. But he's certainly right that the Republicans, conservatives and especially various characterologically malformed neoconservatives will blame on the party in power in 2009 (most likely the Democrats) the outcomes that Bush's fiasco have already made inevitable.

Thus the central Bush policy aim of making this mess someone else's problem. The Dems play the role of the one of Pop's business associates who come in and buy W's failed company out just in time for it to crash and burn.