IRAQ= KOREA? BUSH= IMPEACHED?

The Big Question: did he get any shopping tips from Miss Lindsey?

Today's Chicago Tribune shows an unmistakable trend in Gallup polling this year: outside of a few dead-enders, Americans want the occupation of Iraq to be over.

If Americans had a direct say in the Oval Office, most would tell President Bush to focus on an exit strategy that removes U.S. forces from Iraq. Just one in four would suggest staying the course.

These are among the findings of a Gallup Poll that asked, ''If you could talk with President Bush for 15 minutes about the situation in Iraq, what would you, personally, advise him to do?''

"Bottom line,'' reports Gallup editor-in-chief Frank Newport: "The majority of Americans, as measured in a number of Gallup Poll surveys this year, believe the initial decision for the United States to become involved in Iraq was a mistake. Research also shows a majority of Americans favor a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that Americans-- if given the chance to talk with President Bush about Iraq-- would be most likely to tell him to figure out a way to get U.S. troops withdrawn from that country.''

Weird to look at this in light of Bush's babbling nonsense yesterday comparing the American occupation of Iraq and their civil war with the U.S. presence in South Korea. It's a shame there are no achievement tests-- you know, like they have in No Child Left Behind-- for people who want to run for president.


Someone who's given up on running for president, Joe Lieberman, but who is still working diligently to wreck any prospects for peace in the Middle East, is on a propaganda tour of Iraq now babbling incoherently about progress while American soldiers he meets there are telling him point blank that there is no progress. Lieberman, of course, didn't come to learn or to listen. He came for the backdrop so he could spout his ideological nonsense and then come back and run to Fox News with his on the ground experience.

And although no one rational thinks Iraq and Korea have much of anything in common, Bush's puppet Prime Minister of the Greed Zone seems to think he may be overthrown in a military coup. I guess he's hoping for Petraeus' stillborn surge to save his ass.

When the Bush administration decided to send tens of thousands of additional troops to Iraq, the strategy rested on an unspoken trade-off: U.S. troops would risk greater casualties to tamp down violence and buy the Baghdad government time to make the political compromises needed to reconcile the country's warring factions.

But a resurgence of sectarian violence and attacks on U.S. troops, coupled with little to no progress on crucial Iraqi political goals, is already spurring discussion about whether the current strategy can succeed.

In the near term, senior American military officials in Baghdad are wrestling with how to increase the effectiveness of the "surge" strategy between now and September, when Gen. David Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, is supposed to give Washington a progress report. U.S. officials here and in Baghdad are also waging a parallel debate over how long the "surge" should last-- and whether the U.S. needs to begin planning for an alternative approach that would scale back both U.S. troop levels and American ambitions in Iraq...

In Washington, meanwhile, administration officials have begun to debate how much longer the surge should last and what comes after it. Senior military officials in Iraq have said they would like to see the higher troop levels sustained through early 2008.

But senior Bush administration officials worry that extending the buildup into next year could further turn the American public against the war. Pentagon officials and the White House are developing rough proposals to begin withdrawing tens of thousands of soldiers sometime next year as a way of defusing some of the public fury over the war and making it less of an issue in next year's presidential and congressional elections. White House officials caution that the efforts are preliminary and that President Bush has yet to sign off on them. One aide acknowledged that the White House has developed similar withdrawal plans in the past, only to abandon them when violence in Iraq continued to climb.

White House spokesman Tony Snow yesterday said Mr. Bush envisions an indefinite American military presence in Iraq that would resemble the one in South Korea, with the U.S. in a support role able to "react quickly to major challenges or crises." That presumes, though, that an Iraqi government would request or at least tolerate such a deployment, as the South Koreans have.

Hence the coup reports.