This mess we’re in

So when the slop gets really, really thick, what do you call it? I mean, when it’s way beyond a quagmire? When it’s a super thick, ultra-gloppy, mega-mud bog sort of quagmire? Whatever you want to call this mess we’re in, it’s getting quite obvious that we’re in it and that we’ll be in it for some time to come.

Not that we’ve been paying much attention to Iraq lately. We have the Israelites and Hezbollites to thank for wagging their own dog and deflecting our concerns for the past few weeks. But in case you haven’t noticed, Iraqis in July killed each other at a furious rate, sometimes 100 in a day. 100! If that kind of carnage happened just once in any city on this planet besides Baghdad, it would be blaring, front-page news. In Baghdad and Iraq, though, it’s Ho-Hum City. Just another day at the office. Just another day of guts and bombs and snipings and kidnappings and beheadings in the streets. One hundred people a day. No surprise Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki was inspired to say, “Yo, Dub. This shit’s gettin’ goofy. You wanna help us out here?” To which Dub said, “More troops!” So it goes.

Remember that light smattering of chatter a few months ago about how maybe we would be pulling at least some of our forces out by the end of the year? Feel free to flush such chatter down the nearest R.V. dumping station.

Here we are, 40 months after the invasion, and we gotta send in more of our people to try to put the brakes on a daily slaughter that has all the stench of … of … well, all the stench of a full-fledged civil war. I don’t know what else you call it when Sunnis and Shias are killing each other at the rate of 100 a day. It at least smacks of a reasonable facsimile of a civil war.

Forty months later, and this is the harvest of the Rumsfeld/Cheney/Franks invasion. Civil war breaking out in a hellhole where the daytime temperature gets up to 115 and beyond, and the folks can’t reliably run the air conditioner more than a couple of hours a day. Can you imagine? The high temp for the day is gonna be 118, and you can’t turn on the AC? One wonders how many people in Baghdad couldn’t care less about Saddam or Bush or Allah or Satan; all they want is for the goddamn air conditioner to work when they want it to work. If you gave them that, how many of those much-coveted hearts and minds would you truly win?

If the Dems are looking for a sound bite to bash Americans over the head with in the upcoming campaigns, Bush gave them a real nice one a few months ago when he said that getting out of Iraq will be up to some future president. Not him. Bingo. There you go. Think of what Mr. Rove would do with a gumdrop like that.