Frank Rich: Forces that killed Sheehan's son now in control of Iraq

Raw Story

"The day after Casey Sheehan's slaughter, Dan Senor, the spokesman for the American occupation, presided over a Green Zone news conference promising al-Sadr's woefully belated arrest on a months-old warrant for his likely role in the earlier assassination of Abdel Majid al-Khoei, a rival Shiite who had fiercely opposed Saddam.

Today al-Sadr and his forces control 30 seats in the Iraqi parliament, four government ministries, and death squads (aka militias) more powerful than the nominal Iraqi army. He is the puppetmaster who really controls Nouri al-Maliki -- the Iraqi prime minister embraced by Bush -- even to the point of inducing al-Maliki to shut down a search for an American soldier kidnapped at gunpoint in Sadr City in the fall.

(And, you might ask, whatever happened to Senor? He's a Fox News talking head calling for a "surge" of American troops to clean up the botch he and his cohort left behind.) Only Joseph Heller could find the gallows humor in a moral disaster of these proportions.

It's against the backdrop of both the Saddam video and the Ford presidency that we must examine the prospect of that much-previewed "surge" in Iraq -- a surge, by the way, that the press should start calling by its rightful name, escalation. As Ford had it, America cannot regain its pride by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned and, for that matter, as far as Iraq is concerned. By large margins, the citizens of both countries want us not to escalate but to start disengaging.

So do America's top military commanders, who are now being cast aside just as Gen. Eric Shinseki was when he dared assert before the invasion that securing Iraq would require several hundred thousand troops.

The "surge," then, is a sham. It is not meant to achieve that undefined "victory" Bush keeps talking about but to serve his own political spin. His real mission is to float the 'we're not winning, we're not losing' status quo until Jan. 20, 2009. After that, as Joseph Biden put it last week, a new president will 'be the guy landing helicopters inside the Green Zone, taking people off the roof.'"