Iraq War: Between the proverbial rock and hard place

I suggested in an earlier post that the US may be at a point in Iraq where there are no good options left, only bad ones and worse ones.

These two articles focus on that particular dilemma.  In the article In Iraq, a 'perfect storm' Christian Science Monitor 04/09/04, Dan Murphy reports:

To focus only on the events of the past week "is like looking at the front window and not the whole shop," says Toby Dodge, an Iraq scholar at Warwick University in England. Dr. Dodge says the occupation should have included three times as many troops to keep order, and that there should have been a more cautious assessment of the cultural and political environment than the prevailing view before the war that most Iraqis, happy to be rid of Hussein, would remain cooperative.

Like many, Dodge points to the disbanding of Hussein's 400,000-member army, who largely surrendered, as unwise. "US forces never really controlled the country; they never had enough intelligence assets and the troops on the ground that were needed to impose order,'' he says. "A month after the invasion, the insurgency started to test the Americans, found the hegemon didn't have complete control, and then the insurgency took off."

The fighting has drawn the US into the position that all occupiers want to avoid: combat against a foe scattered among the civilian population. Counterinsurgency in that environment inevitably creates civilian casualties, and even more hostility.

Harold Meyerson's also sees no practical possiblity for a genuinely good outcome in Iraq, Death Grip American Prospect online 04/08/04:

So now the president's war of choice has led to an occupation with no good options. ...

What the Iraqi provisional government [after the handover of "sovereignty on July 1] will have is the Americans [to provide security]. It would be far better off if it had a force under the U.N. banner, with troops from nations that had opposed as well as supported the war, troops from Arab nations in particular.

But the time to have built such a force, I fear, has come and gone. The administration's utter failure to envision the problems that a U.S.-controlled occupation would encounter kept it from going to the United Nations until the situation on the ground was barely tenable. It's still worth trying to get a U.N. high commissioner to supplant Paul Bremer, but it grows harder to imagine why the U.N. would sign on at this late date.

In any event, the administration still shows scant desire to surrender its control of the growing chaos.

This was written two days ago.  And, allowing for the "fog of war" especially in situations like this, the news from the last couple of days indicates that even our hand-picked Interim Governing Council is coming apart.  The generals are reportedly requesting yet another escalatio of troops levels, beyond what Rummy approved last week.  It's hard to see how even a symbolic handover of sovereignty is going to be possible in two-and-a-half months from now.