No more stand up/stand down. Now it's the US's fight all the way.

Stepping aside from the politics of the obvious failure of yet another Bush strategy in Iraq, think about what this means. It is now official policy and plan that the US is fighting a war of occupation.

Military planners have abandoned the idea that standing up Iraqi troops will enable American soldiers to start coming home soon and now believe that U.S. troops will have to defeat the insurgents and secure control of troubled provinces.

Training Iraqi troops, which had been the cornerstone of the Bush administration's Iraq policy since 2005, has dropped in priority, officials in Baghdad and Washington said......

But evidence has been building for months that training Iraqi troops is no longer the focus of U.S. policy. Pentagon officials said they know of no new training resources that have been included in U.S. plans to dispatch 28,000 additional troops to Iraq.

Although this will be frequently played as some version of "gotcha" because it represents the repudiation of an overworn and long inaccurate talking point, the underlying message is significant.

The unwritten subtext in this article is that the Iraqi government is dead. They exercise no influence and are not moving in any way towards reconciliation. The Bush administration and the military have given up on the Iraqis, and all that's left is to fight.

The last paragraph should scare the hell out of you because of its truth.

One State Department official, who also asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the subject, expressed the same sentiment in blunter terms. "Our strategy now is to basically hold on and wait for the Iraqis to do something," he said.

This whole article is worth a read.