Summaries here and here and here.

Whatever the anithesis of gold stars is, the woebegone G. Walker administration’s pages should be festooned with them.

…the Bush administration, spearheaded by outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, has failed the grade badly so far, according to the conclusions of the new report ‘Iraqi Force Development and the Challenge of Civil War’ by Anthony H. Cordesman, who holds the Arleigh A. Burke chair in strategy at the Center for International and Strategic Studies, a Washington think tank. The report was published Monday by CSIS.

[snip]

Cordesman is scathing in his assessment of how the Iraqi government functions, or, perhaps more accurately, malfunctions. ‘The national government cannot even spend its budget; much less demonstrate that it now has an effective ministerial structure or the ability to actually govern in many areas,’ he writes. ‘Actual governance continues to default to local authorities and factions.’

Because of the failure of the central government, ‘There is no real consensus on what legal system to use, courts do not exist in many areas and are corrupt and ineffective in many others,’ the report says. ‘Legal authority, like governance, is devolving down to the local level.’

[snip]

Cordesman is also dismissive of U.S. Department of Defense and White House claims about the major gains that have allegedly been made in restoring the economy of oil-rich Iraq.

‘Increases in macroeconomic figures like the total GDP disguise massive problems with corruption, the distribution of income, and employment, particularly in troubled Sunni areas and the poorer parts of Iraq`s major towns and cities,’ he writes. ‘Young men are often forced to choose between the ISF (Iraqi Security Forces), insurgency, and militias for purely economic reasons.’

The economic picture is depressing across most of Iraq, Cordesman concludes. ‘The real-world economy of Sunni areas continues to deteriorate, and investment in even secure Shiite areas is limited by the fear of crime and insurgency,’ he writes. ‘Only the Kurdish area is making real progress towards development.’ Article

The power and the curse: oil.

Chaos abides.

Every day it seemed more Iraqis woke up to death threats tossed into their carports. At first the death threats were handwritten, but as kidnappings became a daily occurrence, the kidnappers grew more brazen and organized. The terrorists now issue generic, computerized threats with the organization’s name as letterhead. Only the name of the victim is written by hand.

“To the traitors cooperating with Americans,” began one typed death threat received in 2005 by a young architect employed by an American contractor working in the Green Zone. “If you don’t repent, the Mujahideen will punish you and behead you.” The frightened architect, who asked not to be identified, has escaped, leaving some of her family behind. Article

Let’s see: Ticket – check; passport – check; cellphone – check. Codebook?

Hunkering in the Green: So how’s that freedom and democracy going?

Iraq’s parliament will bar the media from future sessions and began on Monday by refusing access to reporters and then cutting off television coverage as a debate on mounting sectarian violence became heated.

Spokesmen for the government and parliament said it was part of efforts, newly agreed by Iraq’s National Security Council, to stop political leaders contradicting each other in public and prevent media coverage that was deemed to inflame conflicts.

“If there is any tension in the state, then the media should be kept out because it may increase tension,” speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani told lawmakers in a televised session after dozens of journalists were barred from the building by security guards.

When one lawmaker rose to object, Mashhadani, from the Sunni minority, ordered the cameras turned off, effectively shutting off public access to a legislature whose election was held up by the United States as a beacon for democracy in the Middle East.

No transcript is published and journalists and members of the public have always been barred from the chamber itself.

After reporters were left standing outside the Saddam Hussein-era convention centre in Baghdad’s Green Zone which houses parliament, Mohammed Abu Bakr, a parliament spokesman, told Reuters that he could not say when they could return. Article

G. Walker and his woebegone administration may not undertsand or “do nuance,” but it, thankfully, has not been expunged from the bazaar, and a crucial distinction is still alive and kicking.

The head of Jordan’s Bar Association Saleh al-Armuti said: “For us this is a day of mourning. The Jordanian government should not have welcomed him here and should not have hosted any summit.”

Earlier dozens of protestors gathered outside parliament in response to a call from the small Al-Rafaah (prosperity) centrist party, brandishing anti-Bush banners.

“Yes to the American people, no to Bush’s policies in the Middle East” one of them read. Article

Contrary to G. Walker’s fortune cookie philosophy, there is no “new phase.” The Moon has phases; war does not. War grinds on and over and through everything in its path and around it, macerating lives, destroying livelihood, sundering family, twisting psyches, immolating treasure, razing achievement, despoiling nature, puncturing policy, perverting probity, disintegrating civil society, laying waste and mulching the warp and woof of what came before.

…with whom do we stand, and who stands with us, in Iraq? Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki heads a Shiite-dominated government that grows closer to Iran and that is propped up by Moqtada al-Sadr, whose militia is the most powerful force in the country other than the U.S. Army, which Sadr has called on to leave Iraq forthwith.

As for the Sunni minority, it’s among that group that the insurgency against both the U.S. occupation and the string of post-Hussein governments took root. At first the number of insurgents was relatively small, but as the Shiite-controlled police force joined the Shiite militias in anti-Sunni pogroms, the number of Sunnis taking up arms ballooned.

So — which side are we on?

In the face of escalating civil war, of an increasingly Hobbesian conflict of each against all, the calls still coming from the U.S. military, the administration and Capitol Hill to step up our training of Iraqi forces seem light-years off the mark. The problem with Iraqi security isn’t that Iraqi forces are poorly trained. It’s that, like the rest of their countrymen, like the very government whose uniform they wear, they’re not really invested in fighting for a unified, nonsectarian Iraq. Why do we expect them to defend an ideal that their countrymen either never believed in or were compelled to abandon under pressure of civil war?

[snip]

We have plumb run out of mission in Iraq.… Article

Keeping up with the courts-martial:

UK troops abused Iraqis detainees and later bragged about it, a soldier has told a court martial. Article