Yesterday Condi said we made 1,000s of mistakes in Iraq. Today she is backpedaling on that comment saying “don’t take it literally”.

One day after Condoleezza Rice said the United States made possibly “thousands” of tactical mistakes in the war against Iraq, the secretary of state says she was speaking “figuratively, not literally.”

Interesting. So if we this was a figurative statement and we really haven’t made these mistakes then that means this “cake walk” war is doing great then? Well according to the latest from the New York Times, it appears not:

The war in Iraq has entered a bloodier phase, with American casualties steadily declining over the past five months while the killings of Iraqi civilians have risen tremendously in sectarian violence, spurring tens of thousands of Iraqis to flee from mixed Shiite-Sunni areas.

The new pattern, detailed in casualty and migration statistics and in interviews with American commanders and Iraqi officials, has led to further separation of Shiite and Sunni Arabs, moving the country toward a de facto partitioning along sectarian and ethnic lines — an outcome that the Bush administration has doggedly worked to avoid over the past three years.

The nature of the Iraq war has been changing since at least late last autumn, when political friction between Sunni Arabs and the majority Shiites rose even as American troops began to carry out a long-term plan to decrease their street presence. But the killing accelerated most sharply after the bombing on Feb. 22 of a revered Shiite shrine, which unleashed a wave of sectarian bloodletting.

We probably have made thousands of errors in Iraq but all those are because of one big error – we went to war in Iraq. We are now in a state that we do not know what to do. The Iraqi’s, even with their record turn out to vote, have still failed to form a government and now one of the proclaimed “father” of modern conservatism, William F. Buckley Jr. is declaring Iraq a “failure” (funny, if that was Howard Dean saying that then we would hear calls of treason).

Yes – Iraq is a massive failure cause by a massively failing administration who is taking the greatest country on the planet down the shitter with them. This is one of the reasons this year’s election could be one of the most important in our history. We need a congress who is not pussies. We need a congress who will hold the administration’s ass accountable for this screw ups that have cost us over 2300 American soldiers and put our country in a record deficit. In my honest opinion, impeachment is the least that should happen to the chickenhawk in the chief.