"Stuck in Iraq" Or George and Dick's Excellent Adventure, the Untold Story

Posted by Rozius from Maureen Dowd's column today, "Stuck in Iraq":

Now we see this classic plotline in the Middle East. The inept captors have become the captives. The country the administration precipitously grabbed and overconfidently took over has ended up trapping, draining, flummoxing and alarming the administration, which is more and more desperate to hand it off and escape.

President Bush said Saturday, "As Iraqis continue to make progress toward a democracy that can govern itself, defend itself, and sustain itself, more of our troops can come home."

And in an interview in the new Vanity Fair, Todd Purdum asks Dick Cheney whether in his "darkest night" he has even "a little doubt" about the administration's course. "No," Vice says. "I think what we've done has been what needed to be done."

But even if they and their 33 percent unshakeable base are still in denial, there's a growing consensus that their plot was hatched, as O. Henry put it, "during a moment of temporary mental apparition" and that we're the Middle East hostages now, to war and oil.

The Sunday graduation ceremony for nearly a thousand new Iraqi soldiers at a base near Baghdad turned into an ugly melee when dozens of Sunnis declared they would fight only in their home areas, another reflection of growing internecine bitterness.

The Washington Post reported last weekend that American troops in Hawija are growing more distrustful of their Iraqi counterparts, fearing that many soldiers they are training are cooperating with the enemy.

Senator Joseph Biden and Leslie Gelb wrote an Op-Ed in The Times on Monday promoting the idea of "decentralizing" Iraq into three "ethno-religious" groups, even though critics argue that this could make it more likely that the Sunni section would become a haven for Al Qaeda and the Shiite sector an Iranian satellite.