So Tony Blair, British prime minister and erstwhile Bush administration hand puppet, has decided to put the finishing touches on a plan to pull his troops out of Iraq.

For anyone following Britain's curious involvement in the war — 40,000 troops for the invasion, scaled back to 9,000 two years later and 7,100 a scant year after that — the move hardly comes as a surprise. Blair took a beating in the U.K. polls about the whole misadventure for years, and it's suspected this troop pullout is an early sign of his intentions to leave his post by the end of the year. But what does the troop pullout mean to the United States?

For starters, it shows that every country's populace has a breaking point for bull, no matter how hard you try to guilt and cajole a populace into supporting you. Americans may be willing to take a nearly masochistic level of abuse and deception from their leaders, but elsewhere, people with an ounce of sense are willing to take their leaders to task for what safely can be judged as a colossal failure.

Secondly, it demonstrates that anything even resembling popular support for the Iraq war has completely evaporated. When you've come to a point in a war in which Blair's Britain, America's loyal international lapdog for at least seven years, is pulling its forces out, you know you've got a problem.

Blair was so willing to move in lockstep with the Bush administration that Condoleezza Rice could have strangled a box of puppies on the floor of the U.N. General Assembly, and I doubt Blair's people would have batted an eye. They'd probably just classify the canines as "enemy combatants" and leave it at that.

To his credit, Bush, that unassailable bastion of hopeful words and garbled syntax, has managed to put a positive spin on the situation. As he has been able to do since at least the 2004 election, Bush has turned what should have been a crippling setback into a positive thing. Rather than deal with the fact that Britain is pulling its forces because of massive discontent with the war and political pressure being levied against the standing administration, the Bush administration has declared that Britain is pulling out because its forces are no longer needed and its occupation of Basra has been a complete success.

Naturally, this begs a question: If the British troops have been so successful, why are we pushing for a 20,000-plus troop increase? By Bush's logic, we should be pulling forces out en masse, rather than sending in many more. The administration, however, has glossed over this point in press conference after press conference, instead falling on the old "we won't leave till the job's done" standby.

But it could be that they've done this for a very deliberate reason.

Back the 1970s, when the public cared and Vietnam was chugging to its inevitable conclusion, Richard Nixon, with the help of Henry Kissinger (who has been a quiet adviser to Bush, as well) declared that the United States would end the war in "peace with honor." Or, if you prefer, "getting out of an expensive, public disaster while desperately trying to save face internationally and domestically."

It could be that by painting a rosy picture of Britain's departure, Bush is trying find a way to extract our troops, as well. By claiming the Brits can leave because their job is done, he has opened the door to say (down the road, most likely near the end of his term) he was pulling our forces out because we did our "job" — whatever that was — to the best of our ability, and we're done. It's Iraq's problem now.

Which, of course, poses a unique problem of its own. The charming puppet government we've installed in Iraq has been an abject, bungling failure from the get-go and, in the intervening years of bloodshed and chaos, it has only become weaker and more ineffectual than it was before. Forget insurgency, forget civil war — Iraq is now, for all intents and purposes, in anarchy. There is no central government, there is no order — only chaos and death. How can we extract our forces if we know the region will completely implode the moment we do?

Because it already has. We passed the point of no return long ago. There is no salvaging the Iraq situation. There is no way to undo the harm our incredibly destructive and misguided foreign policy has done. The only prudent thing to do is follow Britain's example, pull our troops out and stop what needless death we can. It's over. We've lost. Britain has opened the door to justify our swift departure, and if Bush has any sense or compassion, we'll follow them.

Pete Nichols is the State News opinion writer. Reach him at nicho261@msu.edu.