The Bushies' own propaganda line is going to do them in

If they'd managed to sell the country on creating an empire, enforcing Pax Americana, forcibly coverting the whole world to our way of life, and so forth, they might be able to pass off what's happening in Iraq as simply the price of glory.

But there was no way they could have managed that, and they knew it. So instead, they played up to Americans' image of themselves as nice guys and sold the invasion of Iraq as a liberation of the Iraqi people.

That selling-point has now failed catastrophically, and it leaves the US with no discernable reason for being in Iraq. We're not helping the Iraqis, we're not bringing democracy to the region, we're not advancing the fight against terrorism, we're not getting cheap oil in return for our blood. There isn't even an equivalent of the Vietnam domino theory to justify our being there in larger geopolitical terms.

Once people run out of reasons to do something, they tend to do it increasingly badly and soon lose the will to keep doing it at all. That is the real reason the Soviet Union fell -- they could have squelched the various uprisings against them, but having lost all faith in Communism, they no longer had the stomach to summon up the necessary brutality.

The US military has already lost its stomach for that sort of brutality -- that is the real meaning of the pullback from Falluja. The torture scandal will only advance the process, especially if we don't let them sell it as an aberration, but keep making the point that this was an inevitable cost of doing business in Iraq.

At that point, there will be no one left to support the occupation of Iraq except the most extreme fundies and wingnut Freepers. But if the administration ever tried playing to those agendas openly ("We're bringing the Apocalypse." or "We're Americans. Fuck everybody else."), they'd be dead with the rest of the electorate. In short, they're in a box, and it will be interesting to see how they try to get out of it.

Amnesty International and the Arab League are calling for independent investigations. The Arab world as a whole is deeply upset, the administration will not be able to just sweep this under the rug.

Very much agreed.

The US military has already lost its stomach for that sort of brutality -- that is the real meaning of the pullback from Falluja.

Not even close. In fact some of the soldiers are whining about it - they wanted to go in and stomp out the resistance, no matter how many people they had to kill.

What caused the pullback from Falluja is simple political economics:

Rising casualty rates = Falling approval rates.

The Bush cabal knows that getting a few hundred more Americans killed simply to wipe out ONE TOWN would do terrible damage to his hopes for re-election. They are probably thinking "once we win the election, those damn Iraqis will regret ever being born, but until then, let them rebel".

Of course such an attitude risks even higher casualties later, because you can be damn sure the Iraqi's will be fortifying their positions even more in the meantime.