Iraq In Fragments

• Guess what, so the post-surge is going to be surgier than the pre-surge, with 140,000 troops in Iraq by July as opposed to 130,000 last January. As recently as a month or so ago, the expectation was to be under 100,000 by the end of the President's term. This must be because we're winning so completely that we have to leave additional forces to bask in the success.

• Other signs of success include the desperation of an insurgency changing tactics, killing several dozen at a time, a legal system where witnesses disappear and cases splinter and hitting the Green Zone with rockets.

• The different regions of the country present different challenges. In the south, Shiite militia groups have basically taken over Basra and are clashing for power from street to street. This is the civil war within the civil war.

“Most of the killings are done by gunmen in police cars,” said Sheik Khadem al-Ribat, a Basra tribal leader who claims no party membership. He spoke of the militias in an antechamber of his downtown mosque, his voice barely above a whisper. “These cars were given to the political parties. There are supposed to be 16,000 policemen, but we see very few of them on the street, and most of the ones we do see are militiamen dressed as police.”

• In the Kurdish north, dozens are dying daily from Turkish raids against PKK rebels. The Kurdish peshmerga forces have 60,000 massed inside Dohuk province just waiting to strike if the Turks delve too far into Kurdish territory. This is actually a second war front that's been raging for five days, and it ought to be a great concern.

In Baghdad, national security adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie declared at a news conference Monday that the fighting could have "very serious consequences."

Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani warned Turkey against any expansion.

"The operations are still limited operations, and the government has expressed its concern," Bolani said. "If the operation is widened, definitely Iraq will defend its sovereignty and territory."

He said the United States should do more to encourage the Turks to withdraw. U.S. troops "are the greatest force on the ground. They have certain obligations," Bolani said. "They could do more."

Once again, our policy of standing in for the Iraqis instead of forcing them to take responsibility for their own security is coming back to hurt us. We're supposed to now police another war inside the fractured nation.

• All of the ordnance that we've been dropping - six times as many bombs in 2007 as in 2006 - has clearly led to increased casualties, which is why we've stopped counting legitimately.

The report on the increase in bombing comes just after the World Health Organization released the findings of a study which put the number of civilians killed in Iraq between the invasion in 2003 and 2006 at about 151,000. That figure was almost instantly accepted by some supporters of the war who have been eager to discredit reports of much higher civilian deaths.

It's a controversial field. When Gen. David H. Petraeus testified before Congress in September that the escalation of the war in Iraq was going well, he used a graph indicating that the number of civilians killed since the invasion in 2003 until August 2007 was about 37,500. Two days after this testimony, a British opinion polling company released the results of its own study which put the number of civilian deaths between 1 and 1.2 million, 32 times the Pentagon figure.

• And as the wingers continue to maintain that the surge is a success, the truth is coming to light that it's a failure.

Imagine that you had been told in 2003 that when George W. Bush finished his second term, dozens of American soldiers and hundreds of Iraqis would be dying violently every month; that a major American goal would be getting the Iraqi government to temper its "de-Baathification" campaign so that Saddam Hussein's former henchmen could start running things again (because they know how); and "only" 100,000 American troops would be needed to sustain this equilibrium.

You might have several words to describe this situation, but success would not be one of them.