Iraq: Over And Over Again

While everybody waits patiently for the wise and noble Iraq Study Group (which includes nobody who's an expert on the Middle East, but does include former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor) to give their recommendations, Iraq continues to pay the ultimate price:

Four more U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq, the U.S. military said on Thursday, bringing to at least 10 the number killed over the past two days in gun battles and roadside bomb blasts around the country.

Two U.S. soldiers were killed and two wounded in the eastern province of Diyala north of Baghdad, home to a volatile mix of Shi'ites, Kurds and Shi'ites, when a bomb hit their vehicle during combat operations on Wednesday, the military said.

A third soldier was shot dead in an operation in the same province, the U.S. military said. It was not clear whether the incidents were linked.

Another U.S. soldier was shot dead in Baghdad on Tuesday, the military said, bringing to seven the number killed that day.

At least 44 U.S. soldiers have been killed this month, half of them in the western Anbar province, heartland of the three-year-old Sunni Muslim insurgency.

Is there a plan to get results out of this carnage? Apparently the only one is to bear down and will our way to victory.

President George Bush has told senior advisers that the US and its allies must make "a last big push" to win the war in Iraq and that instead of beginning a troop withdrawal next year, he may increase US forces by up to 20,000 soldiers, according to sources familiar with the administration's internal deliberations.

Mr Bush's refusal to give ground, coming in the teeth of growing calls in the US and Britain for a radical rethink or a swift exit, is having a decisive impact on the policy review being conducted by the Iraq Study Group chaired by Bush family loyalist James Baker, the sources said.

Nobody has credibly explained where these 20,000 troops are coming from. And we've already added troops to secure Baghdad, which is the central part of this "plan." It didn't work. We tried it already.

I read somewhere that the guy who probably feels the worst about this is John McCain. He's been asking for additional troops but didn't think Bush would actually DO it. He wanted it in his holster as his wise advice that wasn't heeded and that's why we lost. If we actually try it, and fail, then he'd be outed as the foreign policy fraud that he is.

Michael Hirsh, a very smart commentator who's been over in Iraq for awhile, tells the inconvenient truth:

The U.S. response to Iraq reminds me of those TV ads about the comically slow suitor who, after his girlfriend asks him if he loves her, waits long minutes until she has stalked out of the restaurant before answering "yes" to the empty chair across the table. Bush and Tony Blair are now arguing about whether to talk to Iran and Syria? Two or three years ago it might have made a difference, before the Sunni insurgency that was supplied and supported from outside the country spiraled into sectarian warfare. Back then, had you engaged Syria fully, you might have stopped the cross-border depots and training centers that kept a flow of jihadis and weapons to Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, one of the chief authors of the sectarian hatred, and the other original insurgent leaders. Back then, had you dealt with Iran as it must be—as a major regional power—you might have been able to curb the Shiite militias and their death squads, which were just getting started. But now? The sectarian killing has its own dynamic. What's happening is an internal Iraqi affair, and Iran and Syria have become, for the most part, bystanders.

It is the story of this administration, of course: the inability to adjust prefixed ideas to reality, embodied in an incurious president who is unable to get on top of a problem because he doesn’t follow up on details. Four years ago U.S. officials disbanded the Iraqi army, then sat stunned in their Green Zone bubble while the looting raged and the incipient insurgents began to poke their heads out of the rubble. Slowly the Bush administration began to rebuild the army. Too late, it came to realize it needed Iraqi police as well. Indeed, as army training faltered, U.S. officials labeled 2006 "the year of the police." But again, it was a year or two too late. And now that the police have become tools of the empowered sectarian militias, the Bush team is talking about relying on the Iraqi army again.

It'd be funny if it weren't so tragic. We write position papers and study and come up with grand plans and they all amount to nothing. Iraq is lost.* The sooner people wake up to that reality, the better.

* - I'd love to be wrong about that, but, um, I'm not.

UPDATE: John Abizaid wants to train more Iraqis. Yeah, THAT hasn't been tried for 3 years. Gotta give it up to Hillary for saying what needs to be said.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) took exception with Abizaid's talk of all the steps that the Iraqi government needs to take. "Hope is not a method," she told him. "We've had testimony now for four years about what 'must be done' -- and it doesn't get done."