"Patrick Cockburn, from "Baghdad Is Under Siege" in the 11-1-06
Independent:
Sunni insurgents have cut the roads linking to the rest of Iraq. The country is being partitioned as militiamen fight bloody battles for control of towns and villages north and south of the capital. ... Well-armed Sunni tribes now largely surround Baghdad and are fighting Shia militias to complete the encirclement.
Note the complete absence of U.S. troops from Cockburn's (or anyone else's) account of these battles. It was only a couple of weeks ago that the U.S. command admitted the failure of its plan to encircle Baghdad-with checkpoints and a ludicrous "trench," intended to keep fighters and weapons from entering the city, or leaving the city, or something. Now we learn that Sunni insurgents have finished the job for us, just as Sunni and Shiite militias now control most of the country outside the largely autonomous Kurdish north. The U.S. controls ... well ... the Green Zone, and a few bases it would rather not venture far from.
In Sunni Anbar province, home of Fallujah, Ramadi, and other long-running centers of resistance, the U.S. military and the nominal Iraqi government have no control at all. From Fallujah, Dahr Jamail and Ali al-Fadhily, in this Oct. 31 dispatch with Inter Press Service, quote a senior leader of the Arab National Movement: "The U.S. embassy has real control , as long as there are resistance fighters who are firmly holding the Iraqi streets in Sunni areas, and militias with their death squads controlling the rest of the country as well as the huge oil market."
Then there was this sobering tidbit last week, from the 10-31-06 Washington Post:
The U.S. Air Force is asking the Pentagon's leadership for a staggering $50 billion in emergency funding for fiscal 2007-an amount equal to nearly half its annual budget. ... source familiar with the Air Force plans said the extra funds would help pay to transport growing numbers of U.S. soldiers being killed and wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan.
That's a lot of American bodies.
Meanwhile, Bechtel, the second-largest U.S contractor in Iraq (after Halliburton), led the list of U.S.-based companies that announced last week that they are pulling operations out of Iraq. In Bechtel's words, continuing work in Iraq is simply "too dangerous." What happens to Donald Rumsfeld's privatized military when the private contractors run a cost/benefit analysis and decide there's no money to be made from having their asses kicked?
That, truly, is the bottom line. The U.S. has been finding creative ways, despite and because of its overwhelming force, to lose this war since the day it arrived. It's been a 44-month clusterfuck, and counting....."
more
http://eatthestate.org/11-05/BattleIraq.htm