The newly surging war news is running over my mind in spite my best efforts. Iraqi bogger Salam Pax sums it: "Dear US administration, Welcome to the next level."

Holy fuck. This is what we all feared, some predicted, but no one hoped would happen. It would seem that the kettle is on its way to boil.

Bill O'Reilly wants us out because the Iraqi people "are are not going to fight for their freedom," that they "don't value democracy," and that all this is jeopardizing Bush's reelection. In the midst of trying to grapple with the meaning of All This Horror (see below), I find Bill's assessment to be fucking pathetic, even by the standard of The Factor.

So the Iraqi's "don't value democracy." Perhaps the complete lack of a democratic tradition in Iraq, the reality that the country was invented by the British Empire a century ago, is a factor. Perhaps the identification of the US-backed Governing Council with unpopular hucksters like Ahmad Chalibi cause otherwise believing Iraqis to doubt us.

So the Iraqi police don't rush to the aid of embattled US troops. Perhaps, much like the Marine who didn't come to rescue four American mercs as they were beaten to death and hung from a bridge, the Iraqi police don't feel like risking their hides to help out people they don't really feel all that close to. As for "the people," well, we took their guns away. What the fuck do you want them to do, Bill? Act as human shields? I know Bush is having a hard time coming up with the money to give our GIs body armor, but that's going a little far.

And then he starts in with the Vietnam comparisons. He was of age, though he never served, and he talks about how we gave 50,000 of our own troops for Freedom, but those lazy Vietnamese just didn't have the will take the gift. Wake up call, Bill: the South Vietnamise had eight times as many casualties, so you might want to pick your words a little more closely. You might want to check Rob Macnamara on this too: the prevailing opinion in North Vietnam (and the undercurrent in the South) was that the US was just picking up the colonial ball where the French left off. Astounding as it may be, around the world, the United States isn't automagically assumed to be the good guy in any conflict. Incomprehensible as it might seem to Factor devotees, many of the people in Vietnam rightly or wrongly felt the NVA was on the side of freedom, not the US.

Goddamn it; doesn't this remind anyone of anything?

It's a thing to make you loose faith, this war. It's a killer. It's a killer for what it is, a killer how it happened, and a killer how it's unfolding. It kills me that we went along with this shit, that the public supported it, that I walk in a perminant minority now as someone who was opposed. I remember right before we got rolling -- in that spiritual dead zone between the last big protests and the kickoff of hostilities -- watching "Born on the 4th of July" one night on TBS or USA or one of those networks for men we got for free in Brooklyn. I remember watching and drinking a few pints of beer and getting pretty upset at it all, at what was coming.

I'll be honest. I thought it would be much worse, the invasion. I expected that the best trained, best equipped and most loyal of the Iraqi armed forces would fall back into urban cores and force a Berlin-style seige, bloody and awful and very costly of life. As it was, we anniahlated a 10,000 or so Iraqis, buried a couple hundred of our own, the president flew a plane for a minute, and just like that Major Combat Operations Were Over. It was a pretty easy invasion by any historical standard; three cheers and a grunt for the strength and fortitude of the US armed forces.

Yet here we are a year later and the worm is starting to turn. After a year of steady but low-level conflict -- four hundred more body bags, a few thousand crippled, $200 Billion in contracts and expenses -- things are coming to a head. Urban warfare in six cities. It's likely to get fucking uglier from here on out.

It turns out that many of the movers and shakers in Iraq don't trust the United States, and neither do most of the people on the street. Is this a real big surprise? We blew the fuck out of their country more than ten years ago and then dropped in some punishing sanctions which were largely responsible for sending Iraq back to near third-world status. Then we blew the fuck out of their country again, and even though 90% or more of the people are glad to be rid of the tyrant, that require them to love the folks who rained high explosives upon them and killed their husbands, uncles, sons and brothers to make it happen.

And so can we be surprised that people aren't overjoyed that their lives have been turned upside down, that kidnappers and rapises rule the night, that the power still doesn't work, and that some of their family or neighbors are conspicuously absent? I don't think we can.

The question -- the very fucking difficult question that no one is even pretending to answer -- is what in God's name do we do?