“The worst case has become true”

President Bush says he's determined to "stay the course" in Iraq. He has not said what "the course" is. What is the plan? Is there a plan?

Plan A for this adventure was a fantasy of rose-petal parades and George Washington Chalabi. Plan B does not seem to exist. No one knows what winning or losing would look like in this war without "major combat operations," but to any honest observer this looks a lot more like losing.

On the rare occasions that someone manages to ask our war president if he has a plan he accuses them of wanting to "cut and run."

It's not clear that President Bush knows what he means by "cut and run." That would seem to describe what he ordered done in Tora Bora, in most of Afghanistan, in Fallujah, in Samarra, in Najaf, in Sadr City — in anywhere but the besieged Green Zones of Baghdad and Kabul.

Instead of a coherent plan, Bush and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld offer a hollow optimism and toy with our troops like they're playing some ghastly mixture of children's games. Send the Marines in / Pull the Marines out / Send the Marines in and shake them all about … Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

The toll of America's dead and wounded increases steadily, but not as steadily as the toll of wounded civilians or as steadily as the growth in the insurgency. And to what end? What legitimate goal remains beyond an attempt to save face?

Here is just a sample of recent reporting.

From Markos at Daily Kos:

We've lost this war. We've literally lost entire swaths of Iraqi territory to the insurgents. We've empowered al-Qaida and Islamist militants with new recruits and pictures of prison torture and rape to fuel their cause. We've stretched our military thin, hurt recruitment, made it impossible to respond to actual threats.

In short, this is the biggest political and military blunder this country has faced since — I'll let the historians decide when. But as things are going, this is going to have worse repercussions for our nation than Vietnam ever did.

From the Royal Institute of International Affairs:

Iraq will be lucky if it manages to avoid a breakup and civil war, and the country can become the spark for a vortex of regional upheaval, a report released Wednesday by Britain's highly regarded Royal Institute of International Affairs concludes. …

At most, the report suggests, the United States and its allies can hope for a "muddle-through" scenario, holding the country together but falling short of their original goal: the creation of a full-fledged democracy friendly to the West. …

The fragmentation of Iraq is the "default" scenario, the report says, and would occur if American-led forces pull out of the country too quickly or if the U.S. government imposes its vision on the country too rigidly.

From a New York Times report on the classified National Intelligence Estimate prepared by the National Intelligence Council:

A classified National Intelligence Estimate prepared for President Bush in late July spells out a dark assessment of prospects for Iraq, government officials said Wednesday.

The estimate outlines three possibilities for Iraq through the end of 2005, with the worst case being developments that could lead to civil war, the officials said. The most favorable outcome described is an Iraq whose stability would remain tenuous in political, economic and security terms.

"There's a significant amount of pessimism," said one government official who has read the document, which runs about 50 pages. …

Its pessimistic conclusions were reached even before the recent worsening of the security situation in Iraq, which has included a sharp increase in attacks on American troops and in deaths of Iraqi civilians as well as resistance fighters.

The Times also quotes Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., who responded to a White House request to shift some reconstruction spending to pay for security:

"It's beyond pitiful, it's beyond embarrassing. It is now in the zone of dangerous.

Katherine Pfleger Shrader of the Associated Press provides further details about the NIE:

A highly classified National Intelligence Estimate assembled by some of the government's most senior analysts this summer provided a pessimistic assessment about the future security and stability of Iraq.

The National Intelligence Council looked at the political, economic and security situation in the war-torn country and determined at best the situation would be tenuous in terms of stability, a U.S. official said late Wednesday, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

At worst, the official said, were ''trend lines that would point to a civil war.''

Shrader quotes another Republican senator, Richard Lugar of Indiana, chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations:

''Our committee heard blindly optimistic people from the administration prior to the war and people outside the administration what I call the 'dancing in the street crowd,' that we just simply will be greeted with open arms,'' Lugar said. ''The nonsense of all of that is apparent. The lack of planning is apparent.''

Knight Ridder's Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel interview several other experts who see little hope:

The U.S. strategy to create a stable, democratic Iraq is in danger of failing, current and former U.S. officials say, and the anti-American insurgency is growing larger, more sophisticated and more violent.

A wave of brazen attacks across Iraq has included the deadliest single bombing in Baghdad in six months on Tuesday and at least seven bombings in the capital on Sunday.

The violence increasingly appears to threaten nationwide elections planned for January, which are key to President Bush's hopes for reducing the number of U.S. troops, now 140,000, and making a graceful exit from Iraq.

Many experts on Iraq say the best that can be hoped for now is continued chaos that falls short of a civil war.

"The overall prospects … are for a violent political future," said Jeffrey White, a former senior Defense Intelligence Agency analyst. …

"We are in a no-win situation," said a former senior U.S. intelligence official who's spent time in Iraq but spoke on condition of anonymity.

"I just don't see where we are headed. I think it's getting worse. …"

United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, meanwhile, declared explicitly and bluntly that in the eyes of the U.N. and its Security Council, the failing war is illegal. The Guardian reports:

"I have indicated it was not in conformity with the U.N. charter. From our point of view and from the charter point of view it was illegal."

Also in The Guardian, Sidney Blumenthal provides the assessments of several prominent strategists and retired military leaders.

Retired Marine Gen. Joseph Hoare, former head of U.S. Central Command:

"The idea that this is going to go the way these guys planned is ludicrous. There are no good options. …

Jeffrey Record, professor of strategy at the Air War College:

"I see no ray of light on the horizon at all. The worst case has become true. …

"I see no exit. … We've been down that road before. It's called Vietnamization. The idea that we're going to have an Iraqi force trained to defeat an enemy we can't defeat stretches the imagination."

W. Andrew Terrill, professor at the Army War College's strategic studies institute:

"We have a growing, maturing insurgency group. … We see larger and more coordinated military attacks. They are getting better and they can self-regenerate. The idea there are x number of insurgents, and that when they're all dead we can get out is wrong. The insurgency has shown an ability to regenerate itself because there are people willing to fill the ranks of those who are killed. … The longer we stay, the more they are confirmed in that view."

"If we leave and there's no civil war, that's a victory."

Retired general William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency:

"Bush hasn't found the WMD. Al-Qaida, it's worse, he's lost on that front. That he's going to achieve a democracy there? That goal is lost, too. It's lost. … Right now, the course we're on, we're achieving bin Laden's ends."

"This is far graver than Vietnam. There wasn't as much at stake strategically, though in both cases we mindlessly went ahead with the war that was not constructive for U.S. aims. But now we're in a region far more volatile, and we're in much worse shape with our allies."

"I've never seen it so bad between the office of the secretary of defence and the military. There's a significant majority believing this is a disaster. The two parties whose interests have been advanced have been the Iranians and al-Qaida. Bin Laden could argue with some cogency that our going into Iraq was the equivalent of the Germans in Stalingrad. They defeated themselves by pouring more in there. Tragic."

And finally, here's Christopher Albritton, reporting from Iraq:

… practically the entire Western part of the country is controlled by insurgents, with pockets of U.S. power formed by the garrisons outside the towns. Insurgents move freely throughout the country and the violence continues to grow.

I wish I could point to a solution, but I don't see one. People continue to e-mail me, telling me to report the "truth" of all the good things that are going on in Iraq. I'm not seeing a one. …

And in the midst of all this violence, most of the Iraqi Interim Government is out of town. Security Advisors, heads of important ministries and the chief of the new Mukhabarat are all mysteriously absent. The Iraqi security forces are a joke, with the much talked about Fallujah Brigade disbanded for being feckless and — worse — riddled with insurgents who were being paid and trained by the U.S. Marines. …

The poor and the disenfranchised are finding their leaders in the populist and fundamentalist Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr or in the radical Islam of the jihadis, who are casting a long shadow on this formerly secular country. Iraq has its own home-grown Wahhabists now, something it didn’t have 18 months ago.

In the context of all this, reporting on a half-assed refurbished school or two seems a bit childish and naive, the equivalent of telling a happy story to comfort a scared child. Anyone who asks me to tell the "real" story of Iraq — implying all the bad things are just media hype — should refer to this post. I just told you the real story: What was once a hell wrought by Saddam is now one of America’s making.

No one seriously seems to be considering any longer the idea that Iraq will be "liberated" or that it will be more than nominally democratic. The best-case scenarios paint a picture of a country at the cliff's edge — teetering on the brink of destruction, of becoming another failed state and haven for terrorists, like Afghanistan outside the capital.

The "muddle-through" scenario is now our best hope — but muddle-through to what? Where will we end up once we have "muddled" our way to the end, and how many lives and limbs will have been lost in achieving that muddled result?