corrente

The people who own Bush can't be happy—he keeps getting surprised! Here's reasonable summary of the situation on the ground from WaPo:

In the space of two weeks, a fierce insurgency in Iraq has isolated the U.S.-appointed civilian government and stopped the American-financed reconstruction effort, as contractors hunker down against waves of ambushes and kidnappings, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials.
(via WaPo)

As alert readers knew would happen (back).

"The Fallujah problem and the Sadr problem are having a wider impact than we expected," a senior U.S. official involved in Iraq policy said. In Baghdad and Washington, officials had initially concluded that addressing those problems would not engender much anger among ordinary Iraqis. "Sadr's people and the people of Fallujah were seen as isolated and lacking broad support among Iraqis," the official added.

Instead, the official said, "The effect has been profound."

The violence has brought the U.S.-funded reconstruction of Iraq to a near-halt, according to U.S. officials and private contractors.

The most visible leader of the resistance is Sadr, a firebrand whose appeal long appeared to be limited to the young, unemployed Shiites who made up his militia, the Mahdi Army. However, in a surprising development, his poster began appearing this month at Sunni mosques that previously showed little interest in his activities.

The crises have helped boost the standing of more radical Shiite and Sunni political leaders. "The politicians the Americans wanted to become popular have lost out to the guys the Americans didn't want to become popular," said an Iraqi adviser to the occupation authority. "It was exactly the outcome they did not want."

And, oh yeah: We foolishly threw our barely trained "Iraqi" Army into Fallujah, and most of it collapsed—except for the Kurdish battalion. So now the Sunnis and the Shi'ites are united not only in their resistance to us, but in anger at the Kurds.

Again, the CPA/RNC/PNAC master plan is to turn Iraq into a stable platform for the projection of US power in the Middle East. (All this June 30 foofrah is window-dressing for that.) The plan is to build the largest US embassy in the world, 14 permament military bases, and God knows what else they've hidden in their humongous slush fund of "reconstruction" funding. Not to mention whatever the missionaries must be doing...

Of course, it's going to be hard to spend all our billions effectively if we can't keep the roads into Baghdad open, and—funny thing!—the contractors we've hired to build our occupation infrastructure don't like being shot at, and especially don't like being kidnapped. So, expect a lot more of that from the insurgents, and especially expect to hear stories about "martyrs" from the SCLM if any of them get killed. The modus operandi, perfected in the manufactured Jessica Lynch story, will doubtless be a Special Forces rescue followed by tapes immediately to the media, with the real story to come out a year or so later, when nobody is listening anymore. It is, after all, expedient that some die for the greater good of the Reconstruction. Just to lay down a marker....

qWagmire, anyone? Eesh.