An article in the New York Times today by David S. Cloud and Damien Cave states that American and Iraqi forces have been able to control less than one-third of the city's neighborhoods since the beginning of the Bush's troop escalation months ago.

They had originally thought that they'd have security stabilized by July, and then be able to start restoring services and rebuilding neighbhorhoods.  Now, they hope they can just get the situation stabilized by September.

"We were way too optimistic," said a senior American military officer.
--"Commanders Say Push in Baghdad is Short of Goal," David S. Cloud and Damien Cave, New York Times, June 4, 2007

The problem appears to lie, in large part, with the Iraqi army and police--AS USUAL.  They have not provided all the troops promised, and of those who have come, they've performed poorly. 

That could be due to a point made in the Washington Post on Saturday in an article by Walter Pincus.  It seems that while our army troops are being extended to fifteen months or more in Iraq, the Iraqi army troops being sent to Baghdad only have to serve three month deployments.

Frederick Kagan, the man with the plan who Bush trusted over the entire Iraq Study Group, claims that this is a GOOD thing.

Yeah, he says it helps them all to get that good hands-on experience type of training.

As with everything else Kagan says, I call bull-you-know-what. 

The truth is they barely get there and have time to learn from the Americans what the hell it is they are supposed to be doing when THEY GET TO GO BACK TO THEIR HOME BASES and the Americans, still stuck in their miserable country, get to start all over training another Iraqi group that will be leaving early.

Of course, General Raymond Odierno, second in command of U.S. forces in Iraq, who has his nose so far up Bush's butt that it's a different color than his face, says he "never believed that a mid-summer timetable for establishing security in Baghdad was realistic."

That may be.  If so...then why didn't you say so at the time, Ray?

Other problems are that those Iraqi troops which do bother to show up are coming at less than full-strength, which has been a problem plaguing us since we first started training them.  At any one time, Iraqi army groups may have as many as a third of their units either home on leave or out-and-out AWOL.

Meanwhile, the Americans, who first got shoved into Baghdad by Bush, have already had to cycle out a number of brigades to try and put out figurative fires set by insurgents who fled Baghdad for "the belt" around it, meaning, outlying provinces like the Diyala.  Violence there has spiked so horribly that commanders have been BEGGING for more troops, and Baghdad is where more troops are.

This is nothing new.  Before the definitive Battle of Fallujah in Nov. of '04, the city's residents were warned that, if they feared for their survival, they would leave town, and thousands did.  While this cut down greatly on civilian deaths in that bloody battle, the truth is that any of the insurgents with any rank or brains melted out with the civilians, leaving either hard-core insurgents, or insurgents ordered to stay, or stupid people too stubborn to leave.

My point is that, after that battle pretty much leveled the city and it was secured for residents to return to what was left, the bad guys came filtering back in with them, and now it's nearly as bad as it was then--in fact, when my son returned a year later, it already was.

The exact same thing happened in Tal Afar and Basra and just about every other place we have secured.  So why the military would be surprised by these developments in Baghdad is beyond me.

Meanwhile, we have also had to dispatch thousands of American troops to search for kidnapped American soldiers and British citizens who have also been taken hostage, which, again, drains troop strength from Baghdad.

But that is not the real problem.

THIS is the real problem in Baghdad and the whole damned country:

...Angered by attacks on his soldiers, Lt. Col. Patrick Frank (of the First Battalion, Fourth Brigade of the First Infantry Division) ordered a video camera hidden near an abandoned swimming pool along a main road in Ameel (a mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhood abutting the road to the Baghdad airport), NEAR A POLICE CHECKPOINT, where patrols had been hit repeatedly.  (emphasis mine)

When the video was examined after another attack, it showed two Iraqi policement talking with companions, who were heard off-camera, apparently laying an explosive device.  Minutes after the policement were seen driving away, the camera showed a powerful bomb detonating as an American humvee came into view.--ibid

If this were the only incident like it, or if such things were rare, it could almost be accepted as the cost of doing business in guerilla warfare.

But it's the whole damn country.

The same distrust has hampered relations throughout Baghdad since the strategy began.  In Shula, a neighbhorhood just east of Kadhimiya, north of Rashid, American troops in March discovered a group of Iraqis in police uniforms setting up an E.F.P. near a bridge.  They were using police vehicles to provide cover. 

The American soldiers killed two of the bomb planters.  They later discovered that one had a badge granting him wide access to the Green Zone, the fortified area in central Baghdad where the American embassy and most Iraqi government buildings are situated. 

"That's the level of penetration that these guys have," said Lt. Col. Steven M. Miska, deputy commander of the Second Brigade, First Infantry Division, which is charged with controlling northwestern Baghdad.--ibid

What makes me so damned WEARY about all this is that I've been writing about this since 2004.  It is the SAME PROBLEM and NO MATTER HOW MANY AMERICANS WE THROW AT IT, THE SAME THING IS GOING TO HAPPEN OVER AND OVER AGAIN.

Isn't that supposed to be the definition of insanity?  To do the same thing over again and expect a different result?

Could it be because we have a madman commanding the troops?

Oh--and here's one of my favorite quotes, from the U.S. Ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, in an article from Agence France-Presse:

"It's just way premature to be talking in terms of victory or defeat."--"U.S. Can Forget About Winning in Iraq: Top Retired General," Sig Christensen, posted on truthout.org, June 4, 2007.

Where to start?

Setting aside Bush's insane ramblings about victory and defeat for the past four and a half years, perhaps we should simply discuss THE PAST FOUR AND A HALF YEARS that we have been fighting this godforsaken war!

IS THAT TOO GODDAMNED SOON???

Oh, and in the same piece, retired Army General Barry McCaffrey made a fascinating projection.

He said that domestic support for this war "will evaporate within 36 months."

In other words, when we've been fighting in Iraq for almost EIGHT YEARS and will have, by then, lost close to EIGHT THOUSAND MEN AND WOMEN...then, man oh man, we will finally grow sick of this war here at home.

I'm beginning to wonder if you have to be in-bred to get more than one star on your epulet.

Just the other day, I heard Gen. Sanchez--whose greatest military accomplishment was that Abu Ghraib occurred on his watch--say on NPR that if we could put up to 200,000 troops in Iraq for the next ten years, we might be able to "maintain a stalemate" but that he didn't think the "political climate" would allow that.

The political climate?

WHAT ABOUT THE FACT THAT THE U.S. MILITARY CAN'T POSSIBLY SUSTAIN THOSE KINDS OF COMBAT TROOP LEVELS MORE THAN A YEAR, MUCH LESS TEN YEARS, BEFORE IT FALLS COMPLETELY APART?

WHAT ABOUT THAT, YOU A**HOLE!

Okay.  I'm calm now.  Sort of.

But we've been getting reports that were "way too optimistic" since 2002 where this war is concerned, and yet nothing changes.  We keep expecting the next six months to show something different.

I know our guys are fighting their hearts out right now, doing everything that is asked of them, and I do not wish in any way to short-change their strenuous and bloody efforts.

But the truth is that THE TROOPS are as sick of this exercise in insanity as all the rest of us other than Bush and his dwindling legion of kiss-ass loyalists and what deaf dumb and blind followers have drunk his Kool-Aid--but they're sick of being asked to go out on patrol with troops who, even if they show up, can't be trusted.

You can't begin to imagine how exhausting, physically, emotionally, and psychically, a combat deployment is on an individual.  Many of them have been there more than a year and will have to stay.  Others are there for the third or fourth time or more.  They're worn down to the bone.  Most of them just want to come home alive.

And still they fight, because they have no choice.  But they know what to call what they are being ordered to do:  "F**ed up."

How much longer must this moonstruck madness persist?  How many more troops must pay with their lives for the insanity of those who would send them back to do the same job year after year and expect different results?

When it comes to war...What is the cost, in blood...for optimism?