That Other Little War

With the war in Lebanon, and now the war on JonBenet, the Iraq war has amazingly become lost in the shuffle. I really think the Republican Party is counting on Iraq fatigue among the media, the fact that it's not a "new story," to keep it out of the spotlight until November. Of course, more voters list Iraq as their primary issue than any other. So people will seek out these latest developments:

• July was the worst month for civilian deaths in the history of the conflict, with 110 Iraqis killed every day. That'd be 1,000 a day dead in this country, just to give you a sense of it. This is after the so-called panacea of the Baghdad security plan, and after US troops moved in to the capital to help quell the violence.

• That unity government is showing cracks as the Speaker of the Iraqi Parliament might be resigning:

The speaker of Parliament said Monday that he was considering stepping down because of bitter enmity from Kurdish and Shiite political blocs, revealing the first major crack in Iraq’s fragile unity government since it was formed nearly three months ago.

The speaker, Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, is the third-ranking official in Iraq and a conservative Sunni Arab. Shiite and Kurdish legislators have banded together to try to push him out, mainly because he is considered too radical.

Since taking office in late May, Mr. Mashhadani has publicly praised the Sunni insurgency, called the Americans “butchers” and denounced the idea of carving up Iraq into autonomous regions, which the Kurds and some Shiites support.

“Maybe now is the best time for me to withdraw,” Mr. Mashhadani said in a telephone interview. “My hand won’t be stained as they want it to be stained.”

• Strikes have also doubled against US troops and Iraqi security forces. This might be in part because of the troops moving into less secure areas like Baghdad. But this comment is frightening:

Bush administration officials now admit that Iraqi government’s original plan to rein in the violence in Baghdad, announced in June, has failed. The Pentagon has decided to rush more American troops into the capital, and the new military operation to restore security there is expected to begin in earnest next month.

Yet some outside experts who have recently visited the White House said Bush administration officials were beginning to plan for the possibility that Iraq’s democratically elected government might not survive.

“Senior administration officials have acknowledged to me that they are considering alternatives other than democracy,” said one military affairs expert who received an Iraq briefing at the White House last month and agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity.

“Everybody in the administration is being quite circumspect,” the expert said, “but you can sense their own concern that this is drifting away from democracy.”

This is at the very end of this story, by the way. Talk about burying the lede. That should be its own story.

This "forgotten war" is not likely to be forgotten so long as there are 135,000 American troops over there, despite the best efforts of those sympathetic to the Administration. Those that ask "well, what's YOUR idea for Iraq" need to understand that the time for good ideas in Iraq are over. We passed that over a year ago, as I've continually said. There are no good options left. It's a hard pill to swallow, but the sooner everyone does, the sooner we can have a realistic conversation about how to best stop the bleeding.

UPDATE: Top cheerleader in Iraq Thomas L. Friedman loses his shit, but it sounds curiously like "Cheney, you idiot, you fucked up my lovely little war!"