This will probably be another desultory post of mine, but three stories I read today seem worth talking about. The first is from the WaPo in which War Criminal and “statesman” of the First Iraq dribbles these little pearls of wisdom. I can’t believe he’s not dead yet:

He said Kissinger, who served in the Nixon and Ford administrations, has been telling Bush and Cheney that "in Iraq, he declared very simply, 'Victory is the only meaningful exit strategy.'"

We make a lot of jokes about how the war can be “won” via Tinkerbell’s magic Victory Dust if we all just clap louder, and of how it’s clearly the fault of Islamofascist liberal peaceniks that victory hasn’t magically appeared all over Iraq already. But it’s not at all funny to realize that the “great” minds at the highest levels of the Administration actually believe that to be true.

Reasonable people can agree to disagree, and certainly there is a validly wide range of opinion about how much progress is being made in Iraq. Unlike Republicans, I’ll define my terms: ‘progress’ means a lessening of violence, the return of services like electricity and potable water, and a normalized social economy in which Iraqis can go to work, get paid, and otherwise walk the streets in safety.

Clearly, that’s not happening.

Diyala, he reports, is now largely under the control of Sunni insurgents who are "close to establishing a ‘Taliban republic' in the region." On casualties, he writes: "Going by the accounts of police and government officials in the province, the death toll outside Baghdad may be far higher than previously reported." The head of Diyala's Provincial Council (who has so far escaped two assassination attempts) told Cockburn that he believed "on average, 100 people are being killed in Diyala every week." ("Many of those who die disappear forever, thrown into the Diyala River or buried in date palm groves and fruit orchards.") Even at the death counts in the UN report, we're talking about close to 40,000 Iraqi deaths a year. We have no way of knowing how much higher the real figure is.

There is a lot of good data in that link, I suggest you read the whole thing.

Once a person accepts that the situation in Iraq is spiraling out of control, it becomes easy to hold sneering contempt for “intellectuals” like Kissinger, who are so obviously in love with their own bullshit. A ten year old could take the facts in that second link and come to the conclusion that “victory” isn’t going to happen anytime soon, and seems highly unlikely at all at this point. But we’re not governed by intellectuals, we’re governed by cowering pansies and swaggering bullies, who rely on a consultant class made up of professional poll readers. One thing is very clear to me: none of these people are reading anything factual about Iraq.

Whatever is really in the NIE must have finally shocked some of these people into coming closer to understanding about just how misinformed they really are. The pattern is clear: Republicans don’t read anything that isn’t part of the official Victory Narrative. I think the problem is far greater than just that Bush doesn’t interest himself in anything in print; I think it’s a habit shared by the vast majority of the Republican leadership, many Democrats, and unfortunately, a great number of people who presume to speak about Iraq as if they were knowledgeable. I don’t make that claim, because I don’t have time to read as much of the Arab-language press as I’d like, but also because of this reality:

Journalists are in danger everywhere in Iraq these days, making it nearly impossible to report, and it only seems to be getting worse, said New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins, speaking Thursday at the offices of the Committee to Protect Journalists in Manhattan. Filkins, who will begin a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University this month and start work on a book, said that 98% of Iraq, and even most of Baghdad, has now become "off-limits" for Western journalists.

snip

"We can't go to car bombings anymore," he said, describing how even getting out of a vehicle to report would expose a Western journalist to mob attacks and kidnapping. __As a result, the paper increasingly relies on its 70 Iraqi staffers to go out into the streets and do the actual reporting. These Iraqi journalists, both Sunni and Shiite, do "everything" according to Filkins, and are paid handsomely (by local standards) for their efforts. But they live in constant fear of their association with the newspaper being exposed, which could cost them their lives.__"Most of the Iraqis who work for us don't even tell their families that they work for us," said Filkins. "It's terribly terribly dangerous for them."

snip

American journalists, he said, spend their days piecing together scraps of information from the Iraqi reporters to construct a picture, albeit incomplete, of what life is like these days in the war-torn country. But he says that the work is slow and difficult, and it is hard in such an atmosphere for reporters to nail down specifics. "Five people doing a run-of-the-mill story takes forever," he said.__Most troubling was Filkins' assessment that the U.S. military may not know much more than the Times does about what life is like on the ground in Iraq. Soldiers barely leave their bases and they don't interact very much with average Iraqis, he said, so it is hard to say who, if anyone, has an accurate picture of the current situation.__"Everyone is kind of groping around in the dark," he said._

So basically, one can reasonably assert that when it comes to Iraq, “I don’t know and neither do you.” Republicans like it this way, but good progressives shouldn’t, nor should they forget just how thick the fog really is, when listening to any politician making claims about “progress” or “turning corners.”

The bottom line here is that we don’t even come close to having anything that resembles “control” of the situation in Iraq. According to three different sources linked by the TomDispatch piece, at least 23 different militias vie for control...in Baghdad alone. Iraq is a nation with a population and size roughly equal to California, and its people are almost as diverse as those in that state. Imagine everyone in California with a gun, and no effective government control or security, really pissed off and bombed to shit, and you begin to understand why we call it “clusterfuckapocalypse.”

It’s depressing, but not unexpected, to realize that our leaders probably don’t understand the hopelessness of the situation. But you heard it here first: we will never achieve anything even vaguely resembling ‘victory’ in Iraq. Further, the chaos we are witnessing now is but a mere taste of the horrors to come. When we run out of money to pay for this misadventure, which eventually we must, it will be theocratic and militant forces who go in and carve up the tattered carcass that was once the nation of Iraq. Many of these little kingdoms will be hotbeds of terrorism, and many of them will work in concert with each other and states like Iran, the better to advance their theocratic agendas. It’s important for forward looking realists to accept this, as we develop and discuss policy that will address the question of “what now?”

Any Democrat who has a say in Middle East policy needs to understand this. Hillary, Lieberman, and any other Democrat who believes that the war should continue and that positive results are possible, need to have this truth drummed into them in particular. We’ve been outliers here at Corrente on a lot of issues, but proven fucking right before. Therefore, I’d like to introduce the meme that the war is lost, continuing military action serves no purpose whatsoever, and we had best be prepared to deal with a nightmare environment of multiple mini-Afghanistans of the Taliban era, in which terrorism will flourish for many, many years. At best, we may be able to contain it to the Middle East. But I doubt it.