When the count of U.S. Soldiers killed in the Iraq Occupation hit 150? We’re at 4370 now, not counting another 300 or so folks from the Coalition of the Increasingly Unwilling.

When only 1,500 civilians had died to date due to Bush’s non-existent post-war occupation planning?  Today we’re at somewhere between 95,000 and 103,000 civilian deaths…and climbing.

I was concerned as far back as November 2003 that there were elements within Iraq that would like to keep us around and might carry out actions that would make it difficult or impossible for us to leave.

So far it seems that most of the continuing internecine bloodbath is focused around the Kurdistan/Islamic Republic of Iraq divide in ‘swing’ cities Mosul and Kirkuk.  I think the Shi’ites and Kurds will find common cause at some point and that won’t be an impediment to withdrawal.

I don’t think Iranian meddling will be as much of an issue – if the Mullah government doesn’t fall to the Green Revolution, it will certainly be bloodied, and much less inclined to meddle in Iraqi affairs.

So the real question I think will be the Sunni/Shi’ite divide and how soon and to what extent it intensifies.

“The lessons learned with the failure to find the weapons of mass destruction and some of the other things that happened will make any future president very, very cautious about launching that kind of conflict or relying on intelligence,” Gates told PBS television in an interview.

Any future president is “going to ask a lot of very hard questions and I think that hurdle is much higher today than it was six or seven years ago,” he said.

Oh come on, lessons learned? Maybe he was an idiot, but anybody with half a brain didn’t believe for a second the attack on Iraq had anything to do with faulty intelligence and everything to do with Wrong-Wing hubris and idiocy.

The only ‘lesson learned’ is Republicans are douchebags and shouldn’t hold higher office. Oh and it’s probably time for Obama to start vetting Gates replacements.

After, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, having exhausted all alternatives.

During the period of (general) quiet following the November edict, when the (American) body count was a one-a-day trickle, political pundits pronounced that the ’04 election was going to be about the economy, not about the war. Perhaps that could explain why most Dems gravitated to Kerry as more ‘electable’ than Dean.

But in my November prediction, I suggested that it wouldn’t be too hard for the Iraqis to keep their American pinata around. And thanks to Preznit Dumbass and his reactionary supporters, it looks like we’re about to swim deeper into the quicksand.

It’s Colin Powell’s turn this week as lead dog pulling the administration’s PR sled in Iraq, describing our occupation there as part of the WarOnTerrorWarOnTerrorDon’tAskQuestionsWe’reFightingAWarOnTerror:

He said the security situation remains challenging, with a “major new threat” coming from “terrorists who are trying to infiltrate into the country for the purpose of disrupting this whole process.”

The secretary gave a rough estimate of 100 such infiltrators and said he was confident that the U.S. military can handle the problem.

The fact, of course, is that foreign “terrorists” are at most a small fraction of the problem our military is dealing with. This Knight-Ridder article (link via Juan Cole) shows the real nature of the resistance, from a reporter who interviewed actual guerrilla cell leaders:

The two cell leaders said their fighters primarily were former Iraqi army officers and young Iraqis who had joined because they were angry over the deaths or arrests of family members during U.S. raids in the hunt for Saddam Hussein and his supporters.

The group also shelters remnants of a non-Iraqi Arab unit of Saddam’s elite Fedayeen militia force as well as foreigners who slipped across the country’s long and porous borders to battle American troops, they said. Abu Abdullah, who directs the camp near Baquba, said he came to Iraq shortly before the United States invaded it last spring.

Both cell leaders said they were willing to talk because they didn’t want the story of what was going on in Iraq to be told only from the American military’s standpoint. Abu Abdullah said he wanted to tell people he didn’t consider himself a terrorist, but the enemy of “U.S. imperialism.”

. . . Both spoke disdainfully of “Wahabbis,” as hard-line Sunni Muslim followers are called. Abu Mohammed said there was no contact with members of al Qaida at his level; Abu Abdullah broke off the interview before the question could be asked. But he said his fighters were too valuable to participate in suicide missions, a hallmark of al Qaida, and he rejected the label of terrorist.

“Can you describe a man who defends his country as a terrorist?” asked Abu Abdullah, who said he was 31. “Iraq is the land of prophets and the birthplace of civilization. We will fight until we shed the last drop of our blood for this country.”

Another example of how revenge feeds the anti-U.S. resistance is shown in this article on the funerals of the Iraqi policemen we killed a few days ago:

Mourners gathered under tribal banners and vowed to spill “the blood of the American killers” for the death of an Iraqi policeman and eight security guards killed when US troops opened fire during a high-speed police chase.

Many of the scores of gunmen in the town 50 kilometers (30 miles) west of Baghdad wore masks. A few carried rocket-propelled grenade launchers (RPGs) and one pledged “we will conduct an operation tonight to avenge the martyrs.”

Meanwhile, the killing of the Iraqi police is bound to encourage the “terrorist” sympathizers in other police departments:

KHALDIYA, Iraq, Sept. 13 — The convoy of U.S. military engineers had just entered this rough-and-tumble town when disaster struck. They had a flat tire, stopping the convoy along a ribbon of desert asphalt some Iraqis have nicknamed “the highway of death.”

Soon after, masked guerrillas fired two rocket-propelled grenades. Machine guns crackled across the late afternoon sky. When it ended an hour later, witnesses said, homes were gouged with large holes, two U.S. vehicles were burning, and the soldiers had beat a retreat.

On the sidelines throughout the clash Thursday were Khaldiya’s police, who are supposed to be the allies of the U.S.-led occupation in restoring order to Iraq. Not only was it not their fight, several said this week, but the guerrillas fighting U.S. soldiers had their blessing.

“In my heart, deep inside, we are with them against the occupation,” said Lt. Ahmed Khalaf Hamed, an officer with the 100-man force trained, equipped and financed by U.S. authorities. “This is my country, and I encourage them.”

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Black-robed women wept for lost sons. Old men brandished death certificates with photos of bombed homes and scarred bodies. Jobless men begged for work.

As Secretary of State Colin Powell visited the main U.S. headquarters in Baghdad Sunday, desperate Iraqis kept up a daily ritual at barbed wire barriers outside.

Knowledge that Powell was just a stone’s throw away — meeting Iraq’s U.S. governor Paul Bremer inside one of the former palaces of deposed President Saddam Hussein — heightened the clamor beyond the gates.

“He must be told that the Iraqi people have gained nothing from the American war. Now it is much worse than under Saddam,” said Mushtaq Talib, 28.

Just as in that conflict (and unlike WWII), the U.S. never actually bothered to declare war. In both cases, Congress abnegated its constitutional rights to wage war (a point on which Senator Bryd droned on at great length, in a complete turnabout from his stand on the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution). Fabricated evidence embraced by the Administration provided the causus belli for each conflict (Vietnam had the Gulf of Tonkin incident). Now we’re engaged in the futile endeavor of ‘imposing democracy’ (nation building) on a country that’s preparing to split into at least 2 parts.

And now, in the most chilling development, we’re starting to hear that dripping sound of American blood spilling into the desert as those stubborn ”pockets of resistance’ change their fighting tactics. By the end of the conflict Vietnam had cost more that 50,000 American lives – but of course that didn’t happen all at once. The first troops started dying in dribbles and drabs, 2 in 1959, 8 in 1963 and so on, in a steady escalation. I just hope this time the war doesn’t take 30 years and 5+ million dead Iraqis to play itself out.

In a break with history, however, I’d like to introduce a better metaphor for our unwinnable conflict – let’s replace ‘quagmire’ with ‘quicksand.’ I realize that the Iraqi desert is not particularly sandy, but it seems more appropriate than invoking a jungle/bog metaphor, and given time, the conflict is likely to spill over to Iraq’s sandier neighbors.