Lost in the discussion in the news media of the increasingly chaotic and tragic situation in Lebanon, Iraq grinds on. And today, there was an article in the Washington Post that would probably be the biggest news around here if it wasn't for our attention being elsewhere.
Which maybe isn't a coincidence. Because this article ... well, it's not good news for the White House or the valiant warriors at The Corner.
(below the flip)
So,
here it is:
President Bush said yesterday that he will send more U.S. forces and equipment to Baghdad as part of a fresh strategy to put down rising sectarian violence, abandoning a six-week-old operation that failed to pacify the strife-torn Iraqi capital and opening what aides called an unexpected new phase of the war.
Playing host to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki at the White House for the first time, Bush sounded unusually dour and acknowledged that the situation in Iraq in many ways has worsened lately. But he vowed to adjust tactics to deal with evolving threats and to keep U.S. forces in Iraq as long as necessary to fortify Maliki's government until it can defend itself.
The additional U.S. forces for Baghdad, which could total in the thousands, would come from elsewhere in Iraq, but the deteriorating security situation seemed to all but doom the prospect for significant troop withdrawals before the November congressional elections. The Pentagon had drawn up scenarios that envisioned pulling out as many as 30,000 troops this year, but military officials said yesterday that those now appear implausible and that U.S. forces will probably remain at the current level of 127,000 for several months at least.
Then, the writers make it explicit:
Maliki's inaugural visit to the White House had none of the triumphal mood of Bush's surprise trip to Baghdad to meet the new prime minister June 13. The heady spirit of that day, coming just after the killing of al-Qaeda's leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and coinciding with a new Baghdad security plan called Operation Forward Together, seemed a distant memory as Bush and Maliki stood in the East Room yesterday with grim expressions and subdued tones in their voices [...]
The Bush administration is trying to respond to the shifting nature of the war. Where once U.S. forces were focused primarily on anti-U.S. foreign fighters and Sunni insurgents, today they confront a more complicated situation in which de facto militias are targeting Iraqis, in some cases aided by Iraqi police forces commanded by the Shiite-led Interior Ministry
The Bush Administration has completely lost control over the situation, but more than that ... they are freely admitting it. They're shifting troops around Iraq, never dealing with the basic fact that the situation is beyond control.
When a nation loses the initiative, it's a bad thing. When they completely lose control over the situation, it's tantamount to the end of the mission, unless something proactive can be done to change it. We've been at that stage for a little while now, probably, but now it's out there in plain sight: we're done. Cooked. Finished.
Repeat after me ... Murtha was right. Murtha was right. All Democrats should be talking about ways to get our troops out of Iraq (personal plug: the candidate I work for, Bob Johnson in NY-23, has been calling for redeployment out of Iraq from the beginning of his candidacy ... although this diary's my own views). And it gets even worse ...
The US is about to sell out the one group that's been fairly supportive of the occupation (in relative terms, at least): the Kurds. See, we need Turkish support to help defuse the unfolding disaster in Lebanon, and the Turks ...
The conflict in Lebanon is beginning to have an immediate effect on Turkish-US relations as Washington is in great need of involving Ankara in a lead role in Lebanon.
Turkey's credentials are unmatchable - its geographical location bridging Europe and the Middle East, being a Muslim country with secular background, a long-standing member country of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and least of all, its profound Ottoman legacy in the Levant.
And Turkey won't let such a rare opportunity pass without extracting maximum mileage. [...]
Turkey has been keenly watching the charade of the US and its "allies" in the Arab world and, with the shrewdness of a good bazaari, estimating the price that it must demand when Uncle Sam remembers Ankara. Nothing ever pleases Turkey like a big haggle. And Ankara can now look forward to a really big haggle - nothing less than a Kurdish scalp in northern Iraq. [...]
Turkey says that up to 5,000 PKK militants operate out of northern Iraq to attack targets inside Turkey. In the month of July alone, PKK militants killed 25 Turkish security personnel. Turkey was particularly incensed that the US remained impassive to its requests to do something about the spurt in violence from the PKK's camps in northern Iraq, and instead kept insisting that Ankara shouldn't undertake "hot pursuit" of PKK militants in Iraqi territory.
"Hot pursuit" ... great. Armed Turkish military units invading the Kurdish areas of Iraq. With our explicit support. Yeah, that'll improve the situation for the US.
All of this was sooo predictable. So predictable that I predicted it, in fact. Sectarian violence descending into civil war, Turkish/Kurdish tensions escalating to outright fighting, growing Iranian influence in the Middle East ... And I'm going to stop there before I get too frustrated. It didn't exactly take an understanding of International Affairs rivaling Richelieu to see what was coming.
But here we are, the day of the all-but-official announcement of the end. Oh, sure, there's months of this tragi-farce to go, probably years. And the bleatings on the right will get even louder, more shrill, as they simultaneously search for validation and scapegoats.
But it's over. And the Bush Administration knows it. The President and a few key others may delude themselves for a while, though. Which makes every death from here on out all the more awful. People have always died for a delusion in this carnage, but now ... the mask has been ripped off for all to see. And still the deaths roll on.
How can you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?