Summer of Blood

UPDATED

President Bush warned us that August would be a bloody month in Iraq. If he meant it would be bloodier than the early summer months, the troops are in desperate need of our prayers. On the heels of a grim May, June is off to a horrible start, with 16 American soldiers dying in the first three days of the month. And lest we forget, scores of Iraqis are losing their lives as well.

A total of 127 American troops died in May, the third worst total for U.S. forces since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Fourteen of the latest deaths were reported on Sunday alone by the U.S. military.

North of the capital, a suicide car bomber attacked a police convoy in volatile Diyala province, killing 10 people in a busy market area and wounding 30 others, the local police chief said.

Gunmen at a fake checkpoint near Diyala's provincial capital of Baquba sprayed two minibuses with bullets, killing five people, police said.

Heavy machine gun fire and explosions boomed across central Baghdad late on Saturday from the direction of Sadr City, a sprawling Shi'ite slum and stronghold of radical anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's feared Mehdi Army militia.

[...]

Tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed in the same period. Police said the bodies of 26 people were found in Baghdad on Saturday, apparently the victims of sectarian death squads. Sectarian murders have been on the rise again in Baghdad despite the nearly four-month-old crackdown in the capital.

By the end of the summer, by which I mean the Magical Month of September, the American people will be screaming for an end to this nightmare. There will be no legitimate progress for GENERAL PETRAEUS to report. Nonetheless, GENERAL PETRAEUS will suggest, absent any credible evidence, that progress is being made, and that The Surge must be given until the end of the year. At the end of the year, another arbitrary benchmark will be suggested. At the end of that, another, and so on and so on and so on, all the way to January 20, 2009 when Bush can hand the occupation off to Hillary or Barack or John, whichever of the three succeeds him.

In the meantime, Americans and Iraqis will continue to die for no reason. If we leave Iraq today, the end result will be no different than if we leave Iraq 50 years from today, which this lunatic president thinks is a perfectly lovely idea, by the way.

If the Democrats in congress could just get over their fear of Bush calling them names, they would see that there is nothing to lose and everything to gain by holding him accountable on the war and insisting on an exit strategy that gets our troops home sometime before the year 2060 (which, according to Isaac Newton, is the year of the biblical Apocalypse - you think maybe somebody mentioned this to Bush?).

Bush will likely never acknowledge the failure of his Iraq policy, but that does not mean the Republicans will continue to stand with him as they have. There is an election next year. The last thing the GOP wants is to go into that election cycle with the occupation hanging around their necks. As the deaths mount over this long, hot summer, the people back home in congressional districts all over the country are going to start making themselves heard. By the fall, Republican lawmakers are going to be inclined to listen. If the Democrats don't get out ahead of the GOP on this one, they are going to find themselves in the worst of all possible situations: allowing the Republicans to claim the initiative on getting our troops out of Iraq. They will have surrendered the high ground completely on two fronts - principle and politics. All because they were afraid of being labeled "weak on terror," which line of nonsense the American people stopped buying a long time ago.

The Summer of Blood in Iraq has only just begun. It is time to do the right thing because it is the right thing. Yes, the president and his henchmen will scream bloody murder. It is what they do. Let them. Yes, Republican lawmakers will join them in the namecalling... for now. Let them. By the fall, they will begin changing their tone. In the meantime, Democrats can distinguish themselves by insisting, on principle, that we must begin bringing the slaughter to an end.

UPDATE

Via AMERICAblog, let's hope they mean this.

Democratic congressional leaders, whose efforts to force a withdrawal from Iraq were stymied last month, plan a summer of repeated Iraq-related votes designed to force Republican lawmakers to abandon the White House before the fall.

At the same time, antiwar groups are expanding their campaign to pressure GOP incumbents in their home states.

Both efforts seek to ensure that anxious Republican lawmakers — many of whom have said they want to wait until September to assess President Bush's Iraq strategy — get no break from the war over the summer.

"The debate on Iraq will continue," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) said last week. Pelosi, who in March helped push Democrats to embrace a withdrawal of American combat forces, has pledged that the House will vote on numerous measures aimed at ending the war.