There was a little piece from the AP that it seems a lot of people missed:

BAGHDAD - The U.S. military's top general said Monday that the Joint Chiefs of Staff is weighing a range of possible new directions in Iraq, including, if President Bush deems it necessary, an even bigger troop buildup.

Making no predictions, Marine Gen. Peter Pace revealed that he and the chiefs of the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force are obliged to consider various troop-level scenarios before September, when Bush will receive an assessment of the Iraq situation from his top commander there, Gen. David Petraeus.

"We're (doing) the kind of thinking that we need to do and be prepared for whatever it's going to look like two months from now,"

This is the sound of one shoe dropping. The warning is out there. The recent surge escalation demanded by the Napoleonic War expert Fred Kagan may not be enough. Extending the troops’ tours to 15 months, and dropping their home tours to 12 months may not be enough.

As I said back in April:

The best solution, of course, is to collect up every single walking soldier – everyone in uniform – every swinging dick of them (apologies to the ladies reading this) – including all those female soldiers, who obviously are not as above, and move them all to Iraq. NOW. AT ONCE. TODAY. That includes all the training cadres and Drill Sergeants, except a few that we’ll keep at one training base in the US. It includes every single last solitary Brigadier General and Colonel messenger boy in the Pentagon, every last Major assigned to counting paper clips each morning and ensuring they’re all facing in the same direction. Every single Captain whose job is to carry a General’s briefcase. Everybody goes.

The great shmaedrae report from GEN Petraeus that the nation is waiting for in September has already been written. I’m not going to tell you who wrote it, or where it was written, but I will give you an accurate glimpse at what it will say:

"We’ve made some good progress on the ground, and we are close to achieving our goal. A small infusion of more troops will do the job.”

We have 160,000 troops in Iraq right now, and we are attriting the Mahdi Army. We don’t have to worry about al Qaeda because we’ve got the insurgents doing the job for us in Anbar."

Senator Joe Lieberman (R-Tel Aviv) successfully pushed through a “destroy Iran resolution” in the Senate last week, getting a near-unanimous vote on the worst piece of insanity we’ve seen since the Tonkin Gulf resolution.

Dover Bitch analyzes the cunning backstory to this plan, working off a Sy Hersh article:

" 'Force protection' is the new buzzword," the former senior intelligence official told me. He was referring to the Pentagon's position that clandestine activities that can be broadly classified as preparing the battlefield or protecting troops are military, not intelligence, operations, and are therefore not subject to congressional oversight. "The guys in the Joint Chiefs of Staff say there are a lot of uncertainties in Iran," he said. "We need to have more than what we had in Iraq. Now we have the green light to do everything we want."

Having established the background, Dover Bitch fills in the foreground:

Back to the Lieberman Amendment... If "force protection" is the name of the game, Congress has just, despite their attempts to de-fang the bill, handed the administration a list of Congressional "findings" [ed: 97 of them!] that support whatever Bush and Cheney decide to do in Iran (and in secret). The findings themselves attribute the allegations of Iranian involve[e]ment to military representatives, but there shouldn't be any doubt that the White House would argue that the Congress has accepted them through their acknowledgement.

This is the second shoe being dropped.

A third shoe:

The balance in the internal White House debate over Iran has shifted back in favour of military action before President George Bush leaves office in 18 months, the Guardian has learned.

The shift follows an internal review involving the White House, the Pentagon and the state department over the last month. Although the Bush administration is in deep trouble over Iraq, it remains focused on Iran. A well-placed source in Washington said: "Bush is not going to leave office with Iran still in limbo."
…..
Nick Burns, the undersecretary of state responsible for Iran and a career diplomat who is one of the main advocates of negotiation, told the meeting it was likely that diplomatic manoeuvring would still be continuing in January 2009. That assessment went down badly with Mr Cheney and Mr Bush.

"Cheney has limited capital left, but if he wanted to use all his capital on this one issue, he could still have an impact," said Patrick Cronin, the director of studies at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

The Washington source said Mr Bush and Mr Cheney did not trust any potential successors in the White House, Republican or Democratic, to deal with Iran decisively. They are also reluctant for Israel to carry out any strikes because the US would get the blame in the region anyway.

"The red line is not in Iran. The red line is in Israel. If Israel is adamant it will attack, the US will have to take decisive action," Mr Cronin said. "The choices are: tell Israel no, let Israel do the job, or do the job yourself." [emph added]

Rational and cynical men might not understand why the US “will have to take decisive action” if Israel decides to attack Iran. It’s a good question: if another nation decides on a pre-emptive attack, based on no intelligence or evidence, why must a third country “do the job” itself?

Why does the Yinon Strategy compel the US to attack Iran? Just because Israel has been following a 25 year old plan to destabilize every one of its neighbors, and destroy their social and civil infrastructure in order to neuter them so they cannot stop Israel’s plans to double its present size, how does this obligate the US to bleed itself to death?

I wonder whether America will ever tire of having its foreign policy decisions made in another country?