Iraq slips further and further into chaos

Iraq is slipping away.  News accounts in recent weeks detail a dramatic escalation of random violence, the central authority losing its grip and an overall decline in civil society.  America faces very tough choices now, but "stay the course" certainly is not one of them.  We need a strong and resolute diplomatic initiative that works to restore order and civil society to Iraq.

What is happening in Iraq is no longer a "war."  It is a failed occupation of a nation by a foreign power, and civil society itself is failing there.  What is needed now is a significant and sustained diplomatic and political effort led by Bush himself.  But of course that would require him and his team to admit what is happening there isn't working. 

In the short term the disintegration of Iraq is a much more urgent matter than North Korea exploding a nuclear bomb.  But where is Condi, already so compromised by the recent relevations of the July 10th, 2001 meeting, headed this week? Asia. Why? To do anything they can to change the subject from the worsening situation in Iraq.   

The front page Post story about Iraq should be read in its entirety to get a sense of how bad things are getting there:

BAGHDAD, Oct. 15 -- Militias allied with Iraq's Shiite-led government roamed roads north of Baghdad, seeking out and attacking Sunni Arab targets Sunday, police and hospital officials said. The violence raised to at least 80 the number of people killed in retaliatory strikes between a Shiite city and a Sunni town separated only by the Tigris River.

The wave of killings around the Shiite city of Balad was the bloodiest in a surge of violence that has claimed at least 110 lives in Iraq since Saturday. The victims included 12 people who were killed in coordinated suicide bombings in the strategic northern oil city of Kirkuk.

"This has pushed us to the point that we must stop this sectarian government," Ali Hussein al-Jubouri, a Sunni farmer in Duluiyah, said as he searched for the body of a nephew reportedly killed in the violence around Balad.

The slaughter came as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on Sunday renewed pledges by the Iraqi government to break up the militias, and as al-Qaeda in Iraq and other Sunni Arab insurgent groups declared a new Islamic republic in the western and central parts of the country.

The violence around Balad, a Shiite enclave in a largely Sunni region, began Friday with the kidnapping and beheading of 17 Shiite farmworkers from Duluiyah, a predominantly Sunni town. Taysser Musawi, a Shiite cleric in Balad, said Shiite leaders in the town appealed to a Baghdad office of Moqtada al-Sadr, an influential Shiite cleric, to send militiamen to defend local Shiites and to take revenge. Sadr's political party is a member of a Shiite religious alliance that governs Iraq.

Shiite fighters responded in force, local police said. Witnesses said Shiite fighters began hunting down Sunnis, allegedly setting up checkpoints in the area to stop travelers and demand whether they were Shiite or Sunni.

By Sunday afternoon, 80 bodies were stacked in the morgue of the Balad hospital, the only sizable medical center in the region, physician Kamal al-Haidari said by telephone. Most of the victims had been shot in the head, he said. Other hospital officials said some of the bodies had holes from electric drills and showed other signs of torture. The majority of the victims were believed to be from Duluiyah.

The hospital received calls from residents who said more bodies were lying in the streets, but workers were unable to pick them up, Haidari said. Witnesses arriving at the hospital also reported seeing bodies in the roads, he said....."