reality-based educator

Judge for yourself:

Hooded gunmen clad in black blew up a second Sunni mosque in the southern city of Basra today after ordering the police at the mosque to flee, and despite a curfew imposed by Iraq’s central government, witnesses and security officials said.

The blast at the al-Ashrah al-Mubashra mosque in central Basra, a day after a blast razed another Sunni mosque in the city, suggested that Shiite militias south of the capital have rejected calls for restraint from Iraqi leaders after explosions Wednesday toppled two minarets at a revered Shiite shrine in Samarra.

The latest Basra attack immediately heightened tensions between Sunni and Shiite officials, and for some, seemed to confirm that Iraq’s central government has lost the ability to exert much influence not just on areas of the Kurdish north, but also majority Shiite strongholds in the south.

“The security situation is out of control in the city,” said Wael Abdul Latif, a Shiite former governor of Basra and member of the Iraqi List, a moderate party headed by Ayad Allawi. “The power of the state is weak, and the forces of the Interior Ministry and Defense Ministry are confused and afraid even though handing such matters requires toughness.”

A prelude to when the U.S. pulls the majority of troops out.

And yet, what do we accomplish long-term by staying and trying to keep a lid on the bloodletting?

Whether we pull out today or three years from now, the sectarian violence and chaos is going to explode in Iraq regardless of what we try and do to stop it now.

The mistakes that were made both BEFORE the invasion (should have never gone in, had too few troops, had no post-war plan) and immediately AFTER the fall of Saddam (had too few troops to control country, deBaathification, ignored burgeoning insurgency) compounded by the refusal of the administration to acknowledge the grim realities of the continuously worsening security conditions and sectarian tensions in Iraq have ensured that there is going to be a long period of carnage and mayhem before there is even a modicum of peace.

It would behoove the United States to make sure that everybody involved in facilitating the Iraq mess - from the neocon advisers and journalists who hawked this war in the first place to the Republican Party apparatchiks who dutifully cheered it on for all those years before it became apparent to even them what a disaster the war was to the Democratic Party hacks who signed on to this war because it was the politically expedient thing to do - be left out of future discussions of "What do we do to pick up the pieces now?"

I know that won't leave many of the "Wise Men Of Washington" around to make future decisions and policy, but that, I think would best for all of us.