EVEN THE SEDATE DAVID BRODER. Has had just about enough: "Can we think about the costs of carrying on, without an end in sight, against Hezbollah and the insurgents in Iraq?" I'm not even sure "carrying on . . . against . . . the insurgents" describes what we're doing in Iraq at this point. The reporting has gotten so thin that it's hard to tell what's happening. Lots of people get killed every day, but it's hard to know by whom or why. Oftentimes the killers are wearing government uniforms, sometimes because they are government employees and sometimes because the uniforms are fake. And then you read about how "American soldiers from an Army combat unit that killed three Iraqis in a raid in May testified Wednesday that they had received orders from superior officers to kill all the military-age men they encountered."
I think it's clear at this point that nobody inside or outside the government has any clue how to stabilize this situation. Our troops, despite their best efforts, aren't stopping the country from coming apart. Britain's outgoing ambassador says there'll be a "low-intensity civil war." The longer we stay, the more likely it is that the foreign soldiers in the country are just going to be stuck in the middle of a disastrous crossfire.
--Matthew Yglesias
