Parallel Universe

Here's something just thrown in on the front page of the B section in this past Sunday's Washington Post. It wasn't the top story of the day, and still isn't factoring high on Google News or anywhere else. Of course it would upset the whole "Comeback President" narrative that the media seems insistent to push about Iraq:

Hours before President Bush left on a surprise trip last Monday to the Green Zone in Baghdad for an upbeat assessment of the situation there, the U.S. Embassy in Iraq painted a starkly different portrait of increasing danger and hardship faced by its Iraqi employees. This cable, marked "sensitive" and obtained by The Washington Post, outlines in spare prose the daily-worsening conditions for those who live outside the heavily guarded international zone: harassment, threats and the employees' constant fears that their neighbors will discover they work for the U.S. government.

Here is the document.

This brief note and this cable, which paints a picture of an increasingly unstable and desperate Iraq, written not by those in insurgent strongholds but US Embassy personnel, arguably the most guarded and protected people in the entire country, seems like it's coming from a completely different universe than the happy talk of "last throes," which Deadeye Dick is still pushing. It's quite a horrific cable. Anyone of Iraqi descent seen to be working with the Embassy is singled out for harrassment and threats. Men cannot wear shorts in public anymore, and women can't show so much as an ounce of skin. Ethnic cleansing is occurring at a rapid rate, with Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis being uprooted from their homes and shipped out to less diverse regions of the country. This is of a piece with a civil war, as all sides turn from communities into armed encampments. There are fuel and energy shortages, kidnappings, targeted civilians, and a general sense of alarm.

We hear great things about the starts of crackdowns, in Baghdad, say, or Ramadi, but we never get the follow-up story about how they've ended up. That's because we've taken the same piece of land three or four times, only to watch the insurgents slip away from the fighting, and turn up elsewhere. That's because insurgency is probably a misnomer, since it's a such a large perecentage of the populace engaged in the fighting. Maybe that's why O'Reilly has come to the conclusion that Bill Maher has been saying as a joke for months:

O'Reilly: Now to me, they're not fighting it hard enough. See, if I'm president, I got probably another 50-60 thousand with orders to shoot on sight anybody violating curfews. Shoot them on sight. That's me... President O'Reilly... Curfew in Ramadi, seven o'clock at night. You're on the street? You're dead. I shoot you right between the eyes. Ok? That's how I run that country. Just like Saddam ran it. Saddam didn't have explosions - he didn't have bombers. Did he? because if you got out of line, you're dead.

Bill-O would like to meet the new boss that's the same as the old boss. Of course the way that this war has been managed, only a strongman could quell the destruction of the social fabric our intervention has caused. This was not a foregone conclusion, but resulted from an attitude of turning the Shiite-Sunni divide into the Democratic-Republican divide at home, angering the minority so much (and bolstering the majority as well) that armed conflict could be the only result. We've transformed Iraq from a brutal country ruled by a despot into a brutal country that has no despot. Neither is desirable. And with this option we've lost 2,500 Americans and $400 billion in cash.

The world has a lot of dictators, and now some on the right are pining for another one to stop the violence we created in Iraq. We zeroed in on Saddam above the dictator of, say, Uzbekistan, for still-unknown reasons, other than the fact that the region of the world suggested we could get away with it. We're paying a great price for a pre-emptive policy which ignored the realities of how this might turn out, especially given the mismanagement that these guys in power were sure to bring. And still the permanent fictions remain, highlighted by the Congress passing a FRICKING LAW that said "The United States will prevail in Iraq." Can I add a rider that "The United States will prevail in the World Series?" Because then, finally, the insurgent Toronto Blue Jays will give up and join Montreal in surrender.

We are not going to have a real debate on Iraq in this country as long as the Republicans are in power. Bush is committed to staying there basically forever, because he's got himself convinced that leaving equals losing. And he's not about to lose. This war will drag on and on and on until at least 2009. We're not going anywhere because the Republicans refuse to even enact a policy, yet alone change course. The mantra for 2006, many have said, ought to be "Had Enough?"

Count me in the "Had Enough" camp.