Stephen Hadley, Mr Bu$h's National Security Adviser, slid into Baghdad yesterday on a (naturally) unannounced trip to try to work out some magic plan for the US to hold onto its only overseas tributary. The fact that no Bu$hCo official goes to Baghdad other than on an unannounced trip gives a good indication that they don’t believe their own lies propaganda optimistic forecasts of how well things are going in Iraq.

All Bu$hCo nomenklatura fly into Baghdad, of course, since it is entirely too dangerous to drive in from Kuwait. All supplies are trucked in that way, and a recent videotape supplied by Ansar al-Sunnah indicates they understand just exactly how vulnerable the US troops in Iraq are. The tape describes the road convoy routes as “The Sword that Cuts the Arteries of the Infidels."

The video bears a resemblance to another of the group’s past releases, “Path of Glory ,” in which two men identified as Husam al-Shamri and Mohammed Abu Hajer, a member of Ansar al-Sunnah’s military office, sit and discuss the attacks which unfold and provide clarification for the group’s purpose in these actions. Abu Hajer explains that the supply lines of the enemies are like the beating heart in the body, and the enemy cannot function without supplies. To cut off the supplies then, is like “stopping the heart beat of the enemy”.

Footage from operations conducted within the Northern, Southern, Western, and Eastern regions are shown and described by Mohammed Abu Hajer, captions under each clip providing a description of the individual attacks. He explains that due to the isolated terrain of the western region there is very little influence from the Iraqi government and Shi’ite forces. However, this area and the Eastern region are where the Mujahideen show the captured drivers and alleged members of Jeish al-Mahdi they capture and execute."

According to the NY Times:

Though American officials would describe Mr. Hadley’s talks only in the vaguest of terms, one option widely discussed in Washington and Baghdad in the days before his arrival, according to American and Iraqi officials, is a substantial increase in the number of American and Iraqi troops patrolling Baghdad. It would signal yet another effort to reassert control over the Iraqi capital, which officials in both governments said remains their top priority.

If you can’t even control the capital city of your overseas empire, you don’t have an overseas empire.

The worsening security situation in Baghdad is a good indicator that the occupation, like every other George Bush venture in the last 30 years has been a miserable failure. Every morning reveals piles of bodies that have been tortured and executed, usually by a quick round in the back of the head (“gangland fashion”, as our inept, bought-and-paid-for media keeps describing the state of the victims.) The fact remains that multiple Iraqi and US checkpoints have failed to stem the growing slaughter. Sunni and Shiite gunmen roam freely through the night, dragging victims from their homes, and doing their work. During the daytime, the gunmen seem to roam freely while disguised as Iraqi national police or soldiers. People are abducted wholesale from buses, shops, business places and executed.

Considering the recent news from Iraq it is obvious there aren’t enough US troops in Baghdad to maintain security. CENTCOM had become a bit coy about just how many troops are currently in the Baghdad area, but knowledgeable experts have tendered estimates from “12,000” to “a whole bunch.” The most knowledgeable experts, however, say there are not nearly enough.

We briefly discussed this option, facetiously suggesting the logical solution:

Here’s an idea: Lets’ move all the US forces into Baghdad. Then we’ll have 140,000 US troops and 12,000 Iraqi Army and 17,000 Iraqi national police there.

Maybe that will work. If nothing else, it will put all the troops closer to the Baghdad International Airport, to make it easy to evacuate them.

The NY Times article about Mr Hadley’s surreptitious visit speculates that reasons for the trip include:

…[P]roposals now being discussed inside and outside the two governments range from how to permit greater autonomy for Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish sections of the country without splitting the country apart; how to share oil revenues among Iraq’s population; and an amnesty for those who attacked Iraqi or American troops.

The ideal solution for Bu$hCo and Israel, its only real ally in the Middle East, would be a formalized dissolution of Iraq, creating three autonomous regions loosely linked in some form of federalized entity vaguely resembling the CIS, which was the successor to the USSR. This is one of the major goals of the Yonin Strategy.

Oil revenues, of course, are not going to be shared with Iraq. This has been formalized by Executive Order 13303, issued on May 22nd, 2003. It declares the oil, its revenues, proceeds, etc are the property of US oil companies. If it is absolutely necessary to allow Iraq a few crumbs from the feast table, that might be grudgingly given, with the usual fraudulent accounting so well associated with US oil companies.

An amnesty for Iraqi nationals is a serious sticking point. While certainly all the members of the central government and Parliament believe this is necessary for some sort of domestic calm, that would be a hard item to sell inside the US. US troops will have to stay there for many years. Some say five more years, some say ten. We say US troops will have to stay there until all the oil has been taken. Whatever troops are kept there will certainly have excellent morale, knowing that the Iraqi resisters killing them off will have an amnesty in this life, as well as a favored place in Paradise when they die.