I'd love to write a lighthearted column tonight to kick off Labor Day weekend with entertainment rather than the red alert politics of our day, but I'm duty-bound to keep this major admission from Donald Rumsfeld's very own Pentagon from falling through the tracks in any little way I can.
From The New York Times with the simple headline, "Pentagon Releases Grim Report on Iraq":
Iraqi casualties soared by more than 50 percent during the roughly three-month period ending in early August, the product of spiraling sectarian clashes and a Sunni-based insurgency that remains "“potent and viable,"” the Pentagon noted today in an comprehensive assessment of security in Iraq.
So no matter how much El Presidente tries to make us believe Iraq is the central battlefield of the War on Terror or Islamofascism or The Crusades or Oil, it's all mainly Them vs. Them.
There's even grudging acknowledgementnt of the condition that many of us believe Iraq has already reached:
...the report notes: "Conditions that could lead to civil war exist in Iraq, especially in and around Baghdad, and concern about civil war within the Iraqi population has increased in recent months."”
The report evidently goes on to list "bad news on a variety of fronts" including the strength of Al Quaeda even after we killed Zarqawi (another Dick Cheney certified "turning point?") and "that the Sunni insurgency is strong and that militias are undiminished."
Undiminished.
As in, all 140,000 of us over there haven't made a dent. Not in the militias.
Yep, they dumped the report on Friday afternoon like a Saturday morning Sunni body in a Shiite neighborhood:
The Pentagon distributed the report on a Friday afternoon before a long weekend, a common time for government officials to put out bad news. A Pentagon officials denied that this was the intent and said the report was issued when it completed.
Yadda.
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