Ian Welsh has a diary entry up on The Agonist which is extracted from a NY Times article. You just must read the diary and the article.

Both the diary and the article are built around a power point slide created for a CENTCOM briefing (apparently never shown to the press or general public, since it is described as ‘leaked’.)

The slide tells the story: Iraq is bad, getting worse, and chaos is coming up fast. Replete with timeline and action points, it shows clearly just how the US invasion and occupation have caused other events and processes which are now out of control.

The slide includes a color-coded bar chart that is used to illustrate an “Index of Civil Conflict.” It shows a sharp escalation in sectarian violence since the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra in February, and tracks a further worsening this month despite a concerted American push to tamp down the violence in Baghdad.

In fashioning the index, the military is weighing factors like the ineffectual Iraqi police and the dwindling influence of moderate religious and political figures, rather than more traditional military measures such as the enemy’s fighting strength and the control of territory.
The conclusions the Central Command has drawn from these trends are not encouraging, according to a copy of the slide that was obtained by The New York Times. The slide shows Iraq as moving sharply away from “peace,” an ideal on the far left side of the chart, to a point much closer to the right side of the spectrum, a red zone marked “chaos.” As depicted in the command’s chart, the needle has been moving steadily toward the far right of the chart.

As Ian Welsh writes,

I notice that "unorganized spontaneous mass civil conflict" is routine.

I also note that the military knows bloody well that the militias are taking over the security role, and that government forces are ineffective and the police useless. Seems there's less ethnic strife within the ISF, but, rrrm, more of them aren't taking orders than before.

The most interesting thing about this slide isn't what it tells about what's happening in Iraq, since we know what's happening in Iraq - but that it tells us that all public happy talk aside, the US military knows that the situation is out of control, and has a good handle on why.

Unfortunately, there really is effectively nothing they can do to stop the process.

The other interesting this is that it was leaked. My guess is that a lot of people in the military are rather unhappy with some of the happy talk Generals such as George W Casey have been spewing and think it's time to kneecap them and stop the bullshit.

Well, we’ve known for some time that the flag officers are bullshitting us. As we pointed out here, Flag officers are not allowed to dissent from the Rumsfeld version of BizarroWorld.

A bit of inside baseball: Once I was ordered to attend a Brigade Command Briefing just in ask anyone wanted to ask the guy who saw the shit they were going to talk about any questions about the shit he saw and reported. Since this turned out to be strictly a field grade officer dog and pony show I was off the hook, but it was interesting to see how these officers, trained and educated at West Point Vo-Tech or the Carlisle Academy for Schoolboys, obsessed about things that happened three days ago, but ever discussed the meaning of the things, or the expected effects of the things. “Intelligence” consisted of discussing what the other guy did the other day and not what we think he’s going to do tomorrow.

I see the Army hasn’t changed much in 36 years.