Wake Up

There was an article in Newsday last Thursday that took a hard look at how the war against the insurgents in Iraq is really going.

With security experts reporting that no major road in the country was safe to travel, some Iraq specialists speculated that the Sunni insurgency was effectively encircling the capital and trying to cut it off from the north, south and west, where there are entrenched Sunni communities. East of Baghdad is a mostly unpopulated desert bordering on Iran.

And things aren’t looking to get better any time soon.

Now the 140,000-plus U.S. troops in the country are mainly “a nuisance” factor in the insurgents’ overall goal of preventing the new government from consolidating.

“They understand what the deal is here,” Lang said, “to start applying maximum pressure to the economy and the government and make sure it will not work.” Their roadside bombs are intended to keep U.S. forces inside their bases, he said.

All the while the insurgents are gaining strength, he said. “The longer they keep going on the better they will get,” said Lang, a student of military history. “The best school of war is war.”

The Sunni insurgents could win the battle if they persevere long enough to sour U.S. voters, Feldman said.

He said, “There is no evidence whatsoever that they cannot win.”

It’s obviously long past time to admit that the U.S. strategy in Iraq just isn’t working, but I’m sure the administration will continue to dig themselves deeper and deeper into that hole of theirs. What’s happening now is pretty much what they were warned would happen once Saddam was gone, and they just didn’t care.

[via Atrios]