There are a couple things to remember when reading anything about the Iraq War.

The first is that the Bush Administration does not and never has had any intention of leaving Iraq. Bush has said this publicly. Unsurprisingly it wasn't much noted or commented on beyond its news cycle.

The second is that the Iraq War is being fought, and has been fought since 1991, against the Iraqi people, not Saddam, not the insurgency. No one in the "mainstream" says this publicly. Among the many good articles detailing this ongoing atrocity, this one is only one of the more recent.

Given this a few things follow:

Any talk of "withdrawal" by anyone in a position of power (politicians, pundits) is political theater. Such talk by the man in the street is evidence of a combination of indoctrination and ignorance. This "discussion" has exactly the same value as the pre-war "discussion" about whether and if we were going to war. Its a sham that only creates the appearance of democratic process.

Talk of the welfare of the Iraqi people also falls into this category.

This is axiomatic for people who are not lying to themselves.

It has also been common to criticise the opposition party for not having a plan to "win" the war. However, on the rare occasion when he is asked, Bush also never proffers a plan. No one seems to mind this, and after a while, people have stopped asking about Bush's plans.

Bush doesn't talk about his plan for the simple reason that his plan is monstrous and no one would support it. Originally, by most accounts, the plan was to sweep out the old regime, install a new one, secure the necessary basing agreements, and build a permanent American military presence. Then the focus could turn to Iran.

Since American forces and the puppet government have been met with heavy resistance the plan has had to be revised. Of course no one asks about the new plan. However, it can be inferred from recent events.

Talk Left links to an Independent UK story that ethnic cleansing is well underway in Iraq.

Across central Iraq, there is an exodus of people fleeing for their lives as sectarian assassins and death squads hunt them down. At ground level, Iraq is disintegrating as ethnic cleansing takes hold on a massive scale.

One commenter points out that the US has been running guns into Iraq:

According to a report by Amnesty International, which investigated the sales, the US government arranged for the delivery of at least 200,000 Kalashnikov machine guns from Bosnia to Iraq in 2004-05. But though the weaponry was said to be for arming the fledgling Iraqi military, there is no evidence of the guns reaching their recipient.

Senior western officials in the Balkans fear that some of the guns may have fallen into the wrong hands.

The last sentence is emblembatic of the endemic self-delusion. Replace the word "fear" with the word "know" and the word "wrong" with the word "right" and you've got something closer to the truth. The guns are falling into the hands they are supposed to fall into.

Another commenter notes that Rumsfeld has said elsewhere of the Iraqis that, "eventually they will tire of being killed". When he said this he was referring to Iraqis being killed by US forces, but the logic applies equally in this case. Rumsfeld sees fatigue as the usual result of mass slaughter.

So this is the new plan:

Give Iraqi's the means to kill each other until they are exhausted and when the smoke clears take control. The US press can be depended upon to underreport it as long as US casualties stay within certain limits, so keep those soldiers garrisoned as much as possible. In the meantime, distract the US citizenry with the brown menace to the south.

The act of "deliberately inflicting on a group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part" has a name: Genocide.

Bush has fulfilled conditions that would secure an indictment on all the counts that the defendants at Nuremberg were charged with:

1. Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of crime against peace
2. Planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression and other crime against peace
3. War crimes
4. Crimes against humanity

So the next time you hear that Bush really can't be compared to Hitler remember that at this point its only a matter of scale.