Here's the story so far.

Bush threatened to invade Iran not because he thought they were making nukes--he knew they weren't. He was doing it to force al-Sadr to stand his army down. Yes, invading Iraq would lose the war for us irrevocably but Bush had nothing more to lose than and was well on his way to losing it anyway so why just attack Iran? It would fuck up the Middle way more than it would us. It would hurt al-Sadr immensely. A suicide mission on our part but one al-Sadr can ill afford.

So al-Sadr stood his army down rather than risk the entire Middle East descending into war and chaos and possiblity of nukes being used and his support network being incinerated. Then Bush armed the Sunnis on the promise that they would use the weapons against al-Qaeda only and the Sunnis agreed. That stopped them from shooting at us.

The problem is, al-Sadr then demanded that Bush announced that Iran had no nuke program or all bets were off. Bush can't let this relative calm get away so he admitted Iran had no nuke program. This has infuriated Josh Bolton and Cheney and other hawks because attacking Iran was their ace in the hole. With Bush admitting that Iran has no nuke program, he has no rationale for attacking Iran if the violence in Iraq resumes and, of course, it will.

So Bolton is beside himself shouting that the new intel report is all politics and that Iran is as dangerous the administration has been saying previously.

IOW, we've lost. We can't attack Iran now. We have no political solution for Iraq and we cut Afghanistan loose long ago and it's drifting inevitably into Taliban hands.

Meanwhile, the military is in disarray. The marine corps doesn't want all these MRAPS with the reduced violence and because they can't go where they need to take them to pursue troublemakers and they are too expensive and too huge to store but Congress is insisting they take them--so that's a small war in and of itself. The other problem is that part of the Army brass now wants deployments scaled back to 12 months again because the violence is reduced and the 15-month deployments are draining the energy and morale out of the troops. But commanders in the field are adamant that we can't scale back because the relative calm is still too violent and could flare back up in a moment's notice so we have to stay ready.

It's a catch-22 all around for the military. They're all dressed up with no place to go and the situation cannot be sustained. All al-Sadr has to do is sit back and watch us implode because we can't explode since we can't attack Iran, can't win in Iraq and have already cut Afghanistan loose.

Iran was our last gambit and Bolton knows it. Bush has dealt away his ace in the hole in hopes of some kind of better legacy and Bolton is hopping mad about it. He realizes what Bush has just done. It's over. Just a matter of time now.