A suicide bomber detonated himself in a crowd of Shiites today, shredding more 80 people and wounding 150 others. Elsewhere, gunmen dragged 17 people out of their homes in Taji, killing them on their stoops. All this on top a few mortar blasts, some shootings, carjackings ending in gunshot deaths, and all the rest of the Hobbesian chaos "freedom" has brought.
We can't win if we can't stop this. And we can't, it seems, stop this. So long as our forces fail to secure the country, we will be failed occupiers, not heralds of civic utopia. And so long as we can't secure this country, the men and woman within it will want us out, if for no other reason than because a change might, might calm the random killings. And even if our absence didn't bring peace in its vacuum, the shiites, freed from our direction, could launch war against the Sunnis, a response that'd at least erase the feeling of powerlessness in the face of constant assaults. And so President Talabani, while grinning and promising he'd never accept a timetable, widens his grin and happily says the US can withdraw 40,000 or 50,000 troops by the end of the year. It's time for you to go. We have to deal with this.
Iraq's in a bad way now. And I don't know what to do about it. I don't believe our presence there is making anything better. Indeed, I think we're making it worse. But I don't believe withdrawal will sprinkle fairy dust on Baghdad and turn the place into an Arab "It's a Small World" either. We've fucked up, we've fucked this country up, and while we can slowly tiptoe away, they can't.
