Last Throe Update

Unfortunately, we have a king-size Last Throe Update here -- the insurgents have been busy.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Suicide bombers struck throughout Iraq on Sunday, killing at least 38 people and wounding dozens in a series of attacks aimed mainly at the country's overwhelmed and vulnerable security forces.

The deadliest attack came when a man wearing an explosives vest blew himself up in a large crowd of recruits outside an Iraqi army center in the capital, killing at least 23 people and wounding another 47. Al-Qaida in Iraq said one of its members had carried out "the heroic attack on a recruiting center for the idolatrous guards," according to an Internet statement that could not immediately be verified.

Sunday's attacks heaped dozens onto the number of Iraqis killed - at least 1,500 total - since Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari's government took office April 28. Sunni Muslim insurgents are on a campaign to cripple al-Jaafari's mainly Shiite and Kurdish administration with devastating attacks that expose the government's inability to protect its security forces and infrastructure.

Apart from the bloodshed, ordinary Iraqis are suffering July's sweltering days with only intermittent water and electricity, partly because of rebel sabotage.

Why is the intermittent water and electricity "partly" because of rebel sabotage? What is the rest of the cause? I'm not being sarcastic or pointing fingers here, it just seems like a rather obvious question for the who/what/where/when/why crowd, especially considering that they brought it up. This is a good example of when the media can be a bit lazy; the article is actually a pretty detailed rundown of things, but this "partly" thing is a glaring omission.

Anyway, let's move on -- it only gets worse; apparently Iyad Allawi forgot to take his Freedom™ pills:

IRAQ’S former interim prime minister Iyad Allawi has warned that his country is facing civil war and has predicted dire consequences for Europe and America as well as the Middle East if the crisis is not resolved.

“The problem is that the Americans have no vision and no clear policy on how to go about in Iraq,” said Allawi, a long-time ally of Washington.

That's exactly the problem; that and the fact that since this administration doesn't make mistakes, as far as they're concerned, there's nothing to correct. You'd think W of all people would know that the first step is to admit that there's a problem. At this point, even that might not help, since everyone's pissed at these guys anyway, about all they can do is attempt to trudge more or less in the right direction.

Meanwhile, back in Afghanistan:

Suspected Taliban gunmen have ambushed a border patrol in Afghanistan's southern Helmand province, killing and beheading 10 Afghan soldiers.

The 25-member patrol was attacked on Saturday in the remote desert near the frontier with Pakistan.

The insurgents killed 10 soldiers, and cut their heads off.

A provincial governor says the other 15, including three who were wounded, fled the ambush.

The governor also says the assailants launched the assault after driving across the border from Pakistan and returned across the frontier.

As we've been pointing out, the Taliban have been regrouping and causing mayhem along Afghanistan's frontier provinces, including shooting down a US MH-47 helicopter a couple weeks ago, killing 16 Special Forces troops who were bringing supplies to a SEAL recon team. And now they're back to their old tricks, playing border tag between Afghan turf, and sympathetic villages on the Pakistan side of the border.

As for that SEAL team:

The body of a U.S. Navy SEAL has been found and recovered in Afghanistan, a senior defense official said Sunday.

This would account for the fourth member of a reconnaissance team that disappeared two weeks ago in Afghanistan. Only one of the four survived.

So, not only is the Iraq mission nowhere near accomplished, but we may be pretty much back to square one in Afghanistan at this point. It seems to be unraveling at a faster pace than before, but first we have to decide what we want out of the bargain. If we want the Taliban and al-Qaida eliminated (which would be nice), we may have to put more troops in and put the screws to the regional warlords. We may also have to push Musharraf harder to shore up the holes in the mountainous border region, which is probably simply an untenable position for him.

So we're stuck.

Okay, how about gas prices then? Didn't Dear Leader have a nice public man-date recently, a hand-holding session with one of the Sauds? Wasn't that a signal that prices would ease up?

U.S. average retail gasoline prices surged over the past two weeks to a record high, boosted by high crude oil prices and healthy demand, and prices could rise further should U.S. production be hurt by Hurricane Dennis, an industry analyst said on Sunday.

The national average for self-serve regular unleaded gas was nearly $2.31 a gallon on March 18, up about 9.59 cents per gallon in the past two weeks, according to the nationwide Lundberg survey of about 7,000 gas stations.

This beats the previous all-time high of April 8 of $2.29 by almost 2 cents.

Well, demand isn't tapering off, so I guess Americans simply want more of that good stuff, and they're willing to keep paying through the nose for it. High prices may be the only thing to eventually bring us back to earth as far as the sustainability of our consumption patterns is concerned.

But then, some people just fill up their tanks so that they can commute to their McJob. It hardly seems fair that they have to pay through the nose because of the gas-guzzlers. C'est la vie, chumps.

Finally, we find a prognostication, in the wake of the latest terrorist attack on our British friends:

New York and Washington. Bali, Riyadh, Istanbul, Madrid. And now London.

When will it end? Where will it all lead?

The experts aren’t encouraged. One prominent terrorism researcher sees the prospect of “endless” war. Adds the man who tracked Osama bin Laden for the CIA, “I don’t think it’s even started yet.”

An Associated Press survey of longtime students of international terrorism finds them ever more convinced, in the aftermath of London’s bloody Thursday, that the world has entered a long siege in a new kind of war. They believe that al-Qaida is mutating into a global insurgency, a possible prototype for other 21st-century movements, technologically astute, almost leaderless. And the way out is far from clear.

In fact, says Michael Scheuer, the ex-CIA analyst, rather than move toward solutions, the United States took a big step backward by invading Iraq.

'Self-sustaining' jihad
Now, he said, “we’re at the point where jihad is self-sustaining,” where Islamic “holy warriors” in Iraq fight America with or without allegiance to al-Qaida’s bin Laden.

The cold statistics of a RAND Corp. database show the impact of the explosion of violence in Iraq: The 5,362 deaths from terrorism worldwide between March 2004 and March 2005 were almost double the total for the same 12-month period before the 2003 U.S. invasion.

I think the key is Scheuer's assertion that invading Iraq was really a step back, rather than an actual solution to the problem at hand. We simply ended up committing far too much in terms of manpower and resources to Iraq, when Iraq really wasn't the locus of this international terrorist movement, as advertised. There was lots of talk about "draining the swamp", but little or no acknowledgement that said swamp was really the radical madrassas and mosques of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

We thought we were going to make an example for those states by remaking Iraq, with no real understanding as to the nature of the culture and the people. We took that asshole Chalabi's word for it that it'd be a breeze. And now the swamp, which has continued to breed new mosque-itoes (hyuk hyuk) the entire time, has the ancillary benefit of seeing us with our pants down, stuck in this tar baby of our own making.

It may have been a couple of lightning-quick pincer movements from Umm Qasr to Basra and Baghdad in the beginning, but it's going to be a long road out. We may not even be halfway into this yet, horrifically enough.

So while we're all pretty much on the same page as far as what sort of enemy we face, this fundamentalist whackjob death cult wanting to return to the days of medieval caliphates, there is clearly a lot still to be sussed out as far as effective strategies and tactics for getting to the nut of the problem. If our leaders refuse to find the will to change tack and find something more effective while there's still time, we have to get serious about paying attention and taking the initiative ourselves, starting with the midterms.

Because what we've been doing not only has not eliminated the problem, it may not really have even addressed it much. We don't even know what we don't know, that much has become sadly clear.