Bush in Iraq: The Last Throes?

The political tension between the Bush administration and the Iraqi government has increased dramatically recently and the attack by US troops on a Baghdad mosque that killed an unconfirmed number of people on Sunday has racheted up the rhetoric from both sides:

Via The Guardian:

Senior ministers from the three main Shia factions united yesterday to denounce an American raid on a Baghdad mosque complex in which at least 20 people died, opening the biggest rift between the US and Iraq's majority Shia community since the toppling of Saddam Hussein.
[...]
Exactly what happened on Sunday night is in dispute, but in a political sense it no longer matters. Tension between the Americans and Shia leaders had been rising for weeks, since Washington started pushing for Mr Jabr's replacement as police minister and went on to oppose Mr Jaafari remaining as prime minister.

AP has more on the call to remove al-Jaafari:

BAGHDAD, Iraq - The U.S. ambassador to Iraq has asked one of Iraq's most prominent Shiite politicians to seek the withdrawal of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari's contentious nomination for a second term, two aides said Monday.
The aides to Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim said U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, had asked their boss during a meeting Saturday to personally deliver the message to al-Jaafari.

Meanwhile, the US military is claiming that the mosque massacre was "faked":

BAGHDAD - U.S. commanders in Iraq on Monday accused powerful Shi‘ite groups of moving the corpses of gunmen killed in battle to encourage accusations that U.S.-led troops massacred unarmed worshippers in a mosque.

"After the fact, someone went in and made the scene look different from what it was. There‘s been huge misinformation," Lieutenant General Peter Chiarelli, the second-ranking U.S. commander in Iraq, said.

He rejected the accusations of a massacre that prompted the Shi‘ite-led government to demand U.S. forces cede control of security but declined to spell out which group he believed moved the bodies.

There is no doubt that the whole situation is now a complete political quagmire. Bush has said previously that its troops would leave Iraq when asked to by the Iraqi government and former Secretary of State Colin Powell made the same promise on May 15, 2004. It seems that time may soon be upon us.

69 people died in Iraq on Monday, 40 of whom were killed by a suicide bomber in the area that Bush had touted last week to be the model of Iraqi freedom and success: Tal Afar.