Iraq

This quote is everywhere, but it still bears repeating.

"It is unfortunate that we are in civil war. We are losing each day as an average 50 to 60 people throughout the country, if not more," Ayad Allawi(Iraq's former Prime Minister and current leader of the National Iraqi List) told the British Broadcasting Corp. "If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is."

Out of a really interesting LATimes article on the Bush administration's defining "victory" down from the early claims that the US would defeat the insurgents, to the current plan of handing the problem of the insurgency over to the Iraqis,

"The Sunnis already see us as having chosen sides," said Steven Biddle, a former professor at the U.S. Army War College who is at the private Council on Foreign Relations.

Biddle has argued that by building new Iraqi security forces dominated by Shiites and Kurds, the United States in effect has armed and trained two of the sides in the Iraqi conflict. The Sunnis, he wrote in a recent article, "perceive the 'national' army and police force as a Shiite-Kurdish militia on steroids."

I don't know why, but this AP story on the difficulties Staff Sgt. Douglas Piper has suffered after returning from Iraq with an acrylic eye and brain trauma riveted me.

And, not directly on topic, but surely related to the Iraq conversation, Haaretz, and a couple of other news outlets, are reporting on a new study that claims,

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Middle East policy is not in America's national interest and is motivated primarily by the country's pro-Israel lobby, according to a study published yesterday by researchers from Harvard University and the University of Chicago. ....

The study also documents accusations that American supporters of Israel pushed the United States into war with Iraq. It lists senior Bush administration officials who supported the war and are also known to support Israel, such as Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith and David Wurmser.