“Black-Market Weapon Prices Surge in Iraq Chaos”.

Well, that could be a positive development. After all, if black market weapons were getting cheaper and cheaper, that’d mean it was getting easier for sundry militia groups and so forth to arm themselves. Sadly, read the article and it’s clear that prices are going up because of surging demand for small arms, rather than falling supply. “Rising prices, in turn, have encouraged an insidious form of Iraqi corruption — the migration of army and police weapons from Iraqi state armories to black-market sales . . . three types of American-issued weapons are now readily visible in shops and bazaars here as well: Glock and Walther 9-millimeter pistols, and pristine, unused Kalashnikovs from post-Soviet Eastern European countries. These are three of the principal types of the 370,000 weapons purchased by the United States for Iraq’s security forces.”

Under the circumstances, I think it should be obvious that trying to intensify our efforts to “stand up” Iraqi security forces aren’t going to achieve the intended effects. We’re just pumping more and more weapons into a society that’s hardly suffering from a dearth of armed groups. Were we to start making more progress with Iraqi security forces, the problems would really only grow more intense because the next step would be to start giving them heavier equipment.

Oh, man, this is ridiculous. You may recall a little while back that CQ‘s Jeff Stein asked a couple of GOP members of the Intelligence Committee about the difference between Shiites and Sunnis and they, like various FBI counterterrorism officials, didn’t know anything about it. Now Silvestre Reyes turns out not to know that al-Qaeda is Sunni and Hezbollah is Shiite. Shockingly, this woeful ignorance is an improvement over those dudes he’d asked earlier.

This is very, very pathetic.

Congressional Democrats go to meet with the president about the Iraq Study Group get lecture about Harry Truman: “Instead, Bush began his talk by comparing himself to President Harry S Truman, who launched the Truman Doctrine to fight communism, got bogged down in the Korean War and left office unpopular.”

This would seem to explain a lot. Rather than learning any specific lessons about Truman’s policies, Bush obviously decided that the ticket to being admired by history is becoming very unpopular. And nothing will make you unpopular like get mired in a losing war. Hence, Bush had to find a war for us to lose. And that finally provides the answer to the question of why he was so eager to invade Iraq and why he’s been so loathe to defining our goals there in any sort of remotely achievable goals. It was the only way to guarantee failure.

Mission Accomplished!