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It's worse than it seems
By Steve Gilliard

The look on Donald Rumsfeld's face lately has not been a happy one. As the Bush Administration and its defenders try to pretend that the war in Iraq is not going badly, the reality is that things are getting worse with little hope for a solution in the near future.

Viceroy Jerry has asked for 50,000 troops to maintain his rule. There's one small problem with that. There aren't 50K to give. The US military is nearly at the end of it's deployable strength and needs to withdraw the 3ID as soon as possible.

...The fatal error of Bush's "Bring 'em On" comment is that besides its cheap talk and bully posturing, is that it isn't true. We cannot handle what they're throwing at us. We don't know who they are and we aren't killing them in number. They wound and kill Americans every day and escape. They aren't being killed....

Keep in mind that the Sunnis and the limited guerrilla war has already taxed the US Army to it's limits. A Shia rebellion would make the country ungovernable without using much greater levels of force and that presents a political conundrum. While some on the left expect the worst out of the Bush Administration, the reality is this: killing Shias, be they civilians or guerrillas, would delegitimize our occupation beyond redemption. To fill new graves with Shias would be beyond explaination. To vicitimize Saddam's vicitims would be politically unacceptable.

Yet, to flee from Iraq, would be such a significant defeat, that there is no way that Bush could expect to be reelected and probably would join Lyndon Johnson in not running for a second term during wartime. All talk, from Dean to Hegel, about staying in Iraq "until the job is done" relies on one factor: Shia cooperation. With it, no Sunni rebellion can last for long. Without it, no Sunni rebellion can be repressed for long. Unless we make a deal with the Shias to offer them political power, they will eventually have to join the Sunnis in guerrilla war. As it stands, the resistance to the US is spreading in the Shia neighborhoods in Baghdad.

To do so, however, would create a Shia fundamentalist state in some form. That is also unacceptable....