Very good, almost enough to make me want to care about rock and roll again. Seriously, let me highlight some of the scarier parts. Myth isn’t strong enough to describe what the bobbleheads in the Village are obsessing over, the truth of what is happening in Iraq is stark, and damning:

He dreams of returning to the days when the Iraqi army served the entire country. “In Saddam’s time, nobody knew what is Sunni and what is Shiite,” he says. The Bush administration based its strategy in Iraq on the mistaken notion that, under Saddam, the Sunni minority ruled the Shiite majority. In fact, Iraq had no history of serious sectarian violence or civil war between the two groups until the Americans invaded.

Some time ago I realized we’d all been giving them too much credit. Rovian Maths, Rummy’s Unknown unknowns…they are and were always as stupid and arrogant as they seemed. Only the Mightiest of Wurlitzers has been able to keep that fact from being baldly obvious to a great majority. They can do nothing right.

his is what “victory” looks like in a once upscale neighborhood of Iraq: Lakes of mud and sewage fill the streets. Mountains of trash stagnate in the pungent liquid. Most of the windows in the sand-colored homes are broken, and the wind blows through them, whistling eerily. House after house is deserted, bullet holes pockmarking their walls, their doors open and unguarded, many emptied of furniture. What few furnishings remain are covered by a thick layer of the fine dust that invades every space in Iraq. Looming over the homes are twelve-foot-high security walls built by the Americans to separate warring factions and confine people to their own neighborhood. Emptied and destroyed by civil war, walled off by President Bush’s much-heralded “surge,” Dora feels more like a desolate, post-apocalyptic maze of concrete tunnels than a living, inhabited neighborhood. Apart from our footsteps, there is complete silence.

NOLA is similar. This is the end product of the Shock Doctrine: a barren, burned out wasteland of fences and shooters.

“They killed my uncle here. He didn’t accept to leave. Twenty guys came to his house, the women were screaming. He ran to the back, but they caught him, tortured him and killed him.”

This is happening all the time over there. Iraqis aren’t real people in the minds of most Americans, or more of us would rebel against the horrors of the occupation. No Iraqi is safe from the anarchy of the mob today.

“The only reason anything works or anybody deals with us is because we give them money,” says a young Army intelligence officer. The 2nd Squadron, 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment, which patrols Osama’s territory, is handing out $32 million to Iraqis in the district, including $6 million to build the towering walls that, in the words of one U.S. officer, serve only to “make Iraqis more divided than they already are.” In districts like Dora, the strategy of the surge seems simple: to buy off every Iraqi in sight. All told, the U.S. is now backing more than 600,000 Iraqi men in the security sector — more than half the number Saddam had at the height of his power. With the ISVs in place, the Americans are now arming both sides in the civil war. “

This is why the Dems aren’t in a hurry to end the war, among other reasons. Start leaving, and all those guns and newly trained security professionals start shooting, for real. I thought this funny:

There were 550 weapons missing, including pistols, rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. “Guys take weapons when they go AWOL,” he says. The police were also reporting fake engagements and then transferring to Shiite militias the ammunition they had supposedly fired. “It was funny how they always expended 400 rounds of ammunition,” Gottlieb says.

I’m sure all of those rounds were expended, not.
And this isn’t flattering at all:

he soldiers quickly get back into the Strykers, as do Osama and his men, and they all race to Mahala 830. There they find a group of young men stringing electrical cables across the street. Some of the men manage to run off, but the eleven who remain are forced into a courtyard and made to squat facing the walls. They all wear flip-flops. Soldiers from the unit take their pictures one by one. The grunts are frustrated: For most of them, this is as close to combat as they have gotten, and they’re eager for action.

“Somebody move!” shouts one soldier. “I’m in the mood to hit somebody!”

Another soldier pushes a suspect against the wall. “You know Abu Ghraib?” he taunts.

The Iraqis do not resist — they are accustomed to such treatment. Raids by U.S. forces have become part of the daily routine in Iraq, a systematic form of violence imposed on an entire nation.

Go read the whole thing and pass it around. It’s good inoculation against the “not now” and “give it more time” BS. Leaving will make it worse, but every day we stay only increases the degree of horror leaving will engender. If it helps to be cold-blooded, think of it like a high interest credit card or ballooning mortgage. Under BK and credit laws that can exact your life as payment.