And another thing:
Topic: Iraq

The news just gets better and better in Iraq. Today some three dozen bodies were found around Baghdad all handcuffed and blind folded. (I wonder where the killers got the handcuffs?)[Reuters] This time, though, in a departure from the usual mode of murder, these victims were, in one case strangled, and in another hung. No one knows yet which religious affiliation the dead are, but my bet is that they're Sunnis. Yesterday, other bodies were found in the more traditional way, shot to death. In an interesting twist, two of the four had had their eyes gouged out. (Gotta' love the classics.) This sounds like the MO of the interior ministry or one of the various brigades out there. They're all pretty much working together, so there's not much of a distinction to be made here.

But not to worry, Dick Cheney says "we'll keep at the work until the job is finished." He assured his Aipac listeners that, "Progress in Iraq has not come easy, but it has been steady." (Yes, steadily getting worse and worse.) Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad on the other hand told the LA Times that the invasion had opened a "Pandora’s box" and if things do go to hell, "Islamic extremists in Iraq would make the Taliban in Afghanistan look like child's play." I'm sure he'll be getting a stern rebuke from W. on that one. Maybe something similar to the note LBJ sent over to famous naysayer George Ball: "No more of this." For his part, Rummy said all this bad news was the fault of the media "exaggerating" things. (Where's that guy with the pot in his hand?)

While Rome burns, the Iraqi politicians are fiddling. Yesterday, PM Jaafari said he would not be "blackmailed" into stepping down as the president Jalal Talibani, a Kurd, and the Sunnis are demanding. [AP]A meeting last night between the Shiite alliance and the Kurdish faction failed to produce results in the standoff that's paralyzing the formation of a government over Jaafari. The AP reports that Kurdish legislator Mahmoud Othman said, "There is no progress. We are sticking to our stance and they explained their stance." Yes, that's the way things go in Iraq. Everybody is playing their non sum game to the death, literally.

While they continue to dither, the Iraqi people are in the process of either moving or being forced to move into their own religious enclaves and building up barricades. If the politicians actually do get around to forming a government it will probably wind up looking like Lebanon, with various government agencies in the hands of the various religious factions and everything balanced on the tip of a pin ready to topple, at the smallest provocation, into full blown civil war. If they can't get it together, then the militias will just draw up their own green lines and get to killing each other. In either scenario, we'll be the odd man out. We can hang around and get blown up, like in Lebanon, or we can get out. More than likely, we'll see two or three thousand more dead U.S. troops before W. goes off to build his presidential library.

Just a thought: How many times have you read this line in a media story about Iraqi politics: "The turmoil is threatening to crush American hopes of beginning a troop pull out this summer..." or something close to that? It's like they just cut and paste it into every story. We're not leaving. We may pull out some troops, just in time for the midterms, but we're not leaving. See how easily the press just incorporates the administration’s BS into a straight news story? Just like when we were going into Fallujah in Nov. 2004 and the press kept reporting that the insurgents were "fleeing" before the U.S. onslaught. A truly objective appraisal would have been to say they were "redeploying," which is exactly what they did, all the way to Mosul. (Not the Mott the Hoople song.)