That's how a retired Army colonel described what's going on in Iraq.
Jackie Lyden of NPR interviewed Douglas Macgregor and another retired officer yesterday afternoon. An extended quote is below the fold.
Jackie Lyden - This week Gen. Peter Pirelli, who is the commander of U.S. troops on the ground in Iraq, told an American interviewer for the Los Angeles Times that in his 33 years he's never prepared to fight a sectarian war, a civil war. In your opinion, is the United States someplace it hasn't been before?
Douglas Macgregor - I think the United States is someplace it has no business being. We're occupying a Muslim Arab country with hundreds of thousands of Christian Europeans in British and American uniform. That was always going to be a prescription for catastrophe, and we've handled it badly. I think the addition of these troops is irrelevant. I think we lost the initiative probably by Christmas of 2003, certainly by April of 2004, and have never regained it. When we talk about the so-called insurgency, which has always been largely an indigenous rebellion against an unwanted U.S. military occupation, I think we miss the point that what is really happening is the soldiers have been withdrawn into these large fortresses that are frankly speaking islands of impotence in a sea of violence. If you don't come out of the fortress very much and you sit comfortably behind it, then the Sunni and Shiite establishments are free to tackle each other, and right now that's what they're doing. And this so-called Iraqi army, which is largely a Shiite force, is incapable of coping with it, and frankly speaking I think they're waiting until we're ultimately out of the way so they can move from a limited civil war to an all-out fight for dominance in Iraq.
I searched Google for more background on McGregor, but there are hundreds (thousands?) of men with that name. Lyden described him as an independent analyst. (Update: inclusiveheart, downthread, found his Web site, with the correct spelling of his name, which I've fixed.)
With honest comments like those, no wonder he's "independent" - the Bushies have probably condemned him to Dante's seventh circle of hell...