Turn the Corner Until You Get Dizzy

Highlights (or is it lowlights?) of the broken record know as the Iraqi Occupation/War/Debacle:

American troops are taking Baghdad's streets back from insurgents. The prime minister has a plan for national reconciliation. To the south, in the "triangle of death," two U.S. soldiers are missing, captives in enemy hands.

Those were the headlines a year ago. Now they're being heard again in the newscasts of today, like some grim rewinding of a movie tragedy, of a story that never ends...

...Old Baghdad's constants remain: The sun, boiling orange, still slips below the western desert each evening; the river Tigris snakes, shallow and sluggish, through the city's heart; the muezzins' call to prayer still blares from countless mosques.

The constants of war also remain: the thud of sunrise explosions, somewhere; the zigzagging of convoys down the dangerous roads; the roar of Black Hawk helicopters skimming the tops of Baghdad's minarets...

...The U.S. forces in the latest "take back the streets" campaign are suffering more as well — 126 killed in Iraq overall this May, compared with 69 in May 2006...

...This war has survived countless "turning points," including last June's killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, a U.S. success some in Washington touted as a prelude to a "sea change" in U.S. fortunes.

It wasn't. Now U.S. hopes rest on "Imposing the Law," the four-month-old security crackdown, a "surge" of U.S. reinforcements billed as a promising change of strategy. But this, too, is another echo — of "Together Forward," launched in June last year, and "Lightning" of a year before that...

...Electricity, available a few hours a day, grows scarcer. Four years after the U.S. vowed to restore power, the supply in early June was 8 percent below the 2006 level. Oil production, vital to Iraq's economy, remains crippled — at levels even lower than last June's production. The queues at gasoline stations sap hours of people's days...

Let me make an educated guess here: around January/February 2008, President Bush will announce an increase of troops. Maybe he'll call it (*checks thesaurus*) the "optimization" of Iraq. Democrats will say that it's too late, Iraq's a mess and we need to get outta there. Republicans will call Democrats surrender monkeys and say they aren't giving Bush's "fresh, new strategy" a chance to work. About 5-10% of the Democrats base will waffle because while they want to leave, they don't want to seem weak, and half of that group will make rational-sounding, yet concerned remarks to some key Democrats. Those key Democrats will get their fellow party members to back off the hard "get out of Iraq" talk, which will culminate with one or two "foreign policy" experts from the Party saying something along the lines of "let's give it a month or too." Between then and the artificial deadline, a prominent military official currently dealing with Iraq will either resign, be asked to leave or demoted, wherein s/he will say something about the "optimization" that's anything but positive. The press will jump on this a little, and may even throw in a story about how the troops are having their email filtered so that only happy-happy/joy-joy stories about their deployment make it threw the tubes of the Interweb and to the computers of their loved ones. More troops will die. And somewhere, someone will write a story about how the past six or seven months seem awfully familiar, as if some of the exact sames things had happened the year before...