Iraq: Oh Fuck

While it wasn't true that things were going all hunky-dory in Iraq until the bombing of the Golden Dome at the Al-Askiriya Mosque in Samarra in February 2006, certainly that accelerated the sectarian violence that was already gripping the country. Well, insurgents have hit the Shiite shrine again, this time taking down the minarets. Iraq is now under a curfew, but that hasn't stopped the retribution, as four Sunni mosques have already been attacked. And US officials are worried that the Al-Askiriya attack was an inside job:

Authorities have evidence that Wednesday's bombing of Al-Askariya Mosque in Samarra was an inside job, and 15 members of the Iraqi security forces have been arrested, a U.S. military official said.

The U.S. military official, Maj. Gen. Benjamin Mixon, told CNN's Karl Penhaul that he believes members of the Iraqi security forces who were guarding the site either assisted or directly took part in helping al Qaeda insurgents place and detonate explosives at the mosque's prayer summoning towers, which are called minarets. (Watch the aftermath of the blast, which the U.S. general reportedly says is the work of al Qaeda insurgents )

"He told me there was no evidence at all that this was an attack using mortars or anything of the like and said, in his words, that this was an inside job," Penhaul, who's embedded with U.S. troops in Baquba, told CNN's "American Morning."

Expect a replay of the claims that everything was going dandy in Iraq until this setback, forcing the need for an even bigger surge to get the security situation under control. In truth, the surge has been failing since the start.

The political situation is an absolute stalemate. The Sunni speaker of the Parliament was forced to resign after one of his bodyguards beat up a rival lawmaker, and the Speaker is refusing to resign unless the Maliki government dissolves. There has been absolutely no movement on any of the "benchmarks" desired by US officials, leading the top military commander for the Middle East to demand tangible progress from Maliki (and that means "give us that oil law, really). No substantive progress is expected on the political situation this year.

Meanwhile, the civilian death toll continues at higher levels than a year ago, despite military actions by US troops, including a doubling in the number of airstrikes since 2006. We're bombing the country into the Stone Age to try and wage peace from 20,000 feet, but this is not impacting anything on the ground. Now even more Iraqi security forces are urged, and we're even arming Sunni insurgents so we can capitalize on the one bright spot, Sunnis turning on Al Qaeda in Al Anbar. So we decry Iran supplying insurgents (without evidence) while doing the EXACT SAME THING, while they continue to target and kill US troops. The insurgents are using those weapons, by the way, to bomb infrastructure and frustrate any attempts to unify the country.

The bridge bombing campaigns overlap and are escalating steadily bot within and outside Baghdad. This is the third major bombing this in les than a fortnight. The goals of these campaigns are as follows:

To isolate Baghdad.

To isolate districts of Baghdad.

To cut off the governorates one from another.

The isolation of Baghdad from the rest of the country is an important goal for those resisting the continued American attempts to subjugate Iraq. By doing so they deny political credibility to the green zone government headed by Nouri Al Maliki.

Militarily it is part of the push to isolate the American forces stationed in the capital and then pick them off at leisure.

A similar benefit to those resisting the Americans derives from the bombings within Baghdad itself.

Bridge bombings within Baghdad make it far more difficult for American and green zone government forces to establish anything other than temporary control of huge swathes of the capital, to respond to incidents, or to reinforce units under pressure or indeed in danger of annihilation when they are attacked.

We're just running in circles in Iraq. Last year, the Samarra bombing accelerated sectarian violence, leading to calls to rebuild the mosque (we didn't) and eventually, a surge. Now, there's another Samarra bombing, accelerating raging sectarian violence, and leading to, perhaps, another surge. What we need to do is come to terms with that great unmentionable word:

The endgame in Iraq is now clear, in outline if not detail, and it appears that the heavily favored United States will be upset. Once support for a war is lost, it is gone for good; there is no example of a modern democracy having changed its mind once it turned against a war. So we ought to start coming to grips with the meaning of losing in Iraq.

The consequences for the national psyche are likely to be profound, throwing American politics into a downward spiral of bitter recriminations the likes of which it has not seen in a generation. It will be a wedge that politicians will exploit for their benefit, proving yet again that politics is the eternal enemy of strategy. The Vietnam syndrome divided this country for decades; the Iraq syndrome will be no different [...]

The American people seem to understand, however — and historians will certainly agree — that the war itself was a catastrophic mistake. It was a faulty grand strategy, not poor implementation. The Bush administration was operating under an international political illusion, one that is further discredited with every car bombing of a crowded Baghdad marketplace and every Iraqi doctor who packs up his family and flees his country [...]

Hopefully at some point during the recriminations to come, the American people will seize the opportunity to ask themselves a series of fundamental questions about the role and purpose of U.S. power in the world. How much influence can the United States have in the Middle East? Is its oil worth American blood and treasure? Are we really safer now that Iraq burns? Might we not be better off just leaving the region alone?

Perhaps at some point we will come to recognize that the United States can afford to be much more restrained in its foreign policy adventures. Were our founding fathers here, they would surely look on Iraq with horror and judge that the nation they created had fundamentally lost its way. If the war in Iraq leads the United States to return to its traditional, restrained grand strategy, then perhaps the whole experience will not have been in vain.

We're going to continue to stay in Iraq, of course, for a variety of strange and conflicting reasons. But the American people understand that we really should leave, because our presence is making nothing better. It's just engendering an endless stream of deja vu.