This is going to go over really well:

More than a third of Iraq's national police battalion commanders are now Sunni after a purge of Shiites who had a sectarian bias, a U.S. general said Monday.

I seem to recall that under Saddam a Sunni minority ruled over and oppressed a Shiite majority. After we moved in, we got rid of the Sunnis, then we put them in power again, then removed them, then put them in power. We've armed the Sunnis against the Shiites, and the Shiites against the Sunnis. We've claimed that Iran is helping the Sunnis (ha!), wait, no Iran is helping the Shiites. But they're all al Qaeda, we can be sure of that. Even if al Qaeda is a Saudi terrorist organization made up exclusively of Sunnis and supported by payoffs from the Saudi royal family to extremist organizations within Saudi Arabia in order to buy a little bit of stability.

I almost believe that the Bush administration is purposefully trying to make Iraq a meatgrinder for American soldiers. The only thing that keeps me from really buying that particular conspiracy theory is that the stories coming out of Iraq seem to all be of the "they couldn't have done it that way if they tried" variety.

Army Brigadier General Dana Pittard, the outgoing commander of US efforts to train Iraqi police and military units, also dropped this little gem in his farewell remarks:

"I nearly shed a tear when I saw Baqouba today," Pittard said of the capital city in Diyala province. "The markets aren't up, the projects that we had spent so much time on, together with the Iraqi government, are now, in many places, in shambles

Here's the on-the-ground assessment of what's really happening in Iraq. Here's the unvarnished truth, the grim reality that everyone needs to face: things are not improving, the country is not stabilizing, and the projects that our soldiers are working on when not being blown up by insurgents using American weapons and training are themselves being blown up and torn apart by insurgents using American equipment and training.

The most despicable, evil, amoral, lying, thieving inhuman monsters that our nation has yet produced. That's who we have in the White House, who stalks the halls of Congress, who populate the high offices of our land. The deaths of thousands, the injuries of hundreds of thousands, the torture of thousands more, the imprisonment of the innocent, the destruction of an entire nation - all of this and more is accomplished at their whim. They send our soldiers to die and those fortunate enough to make it back are denied the very basic benefits and rights due them by their own contracts with our military.

If you don't seethe with anger, if you don't fight the impulse to hate George Bush, Dick Cheney and the rest of the scumbags in our government, then you either aren't paying attention or you have a serious problem with morality yourself.

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