This morning another car bombing hit the Baghdad Hotel in the city’s center. US and CPA officials and contractors have made the hotel their headquarters. The preliminary casualty count is 6 confirmed dead and at least 10 injured. The Baghdad rumor mill has it that the CIA was had taken over the hotel as its Baghdad. Whether the rumor is true or not it is widely believed in Iraq and makes the hotel a prime target.

The President’s boasts of “good progress” not withstanding, life in Iraq is not being stabilized but rather is spinning apart in the centrifuge of chaos. With every ambush; with every attack the point is being driven home that the force level we have committed to occupy and stabilize Iraq is insufficient. Each explosion illustrates the inability to control the ordinance dumps that General Sanchez referred to. There just are not enough troops on the ground to control the conventional weapons that the Iraqi resistance uses in an unconventional war.

The British have been fighting this kind of war for decades in Ulster. The Israeli Defense Force has been unsuccessful in pacifying its own territory throughout its existence. The unguarded ammo dumps give the Iraqi resistance access to ordinance that the IRA and PLO has never had. The Bush administration has not been willing to provide our commanders on the ground with the men and materiel required to control that flow of the stuff of war to the amorphous enemy. It has not been willing to give up the spoils of war to achieve international participation in the stabilization and reconstruction of Iraqi sovereignty. It has been unwilling to recognize that so long as an American occupation continues so will the war of attrition.

The Administration is unwilling to admit that its imposition of an American Viceroy over the Iraqi nation has not produced an effective interim regime. It is unwilling to abandon its search for a justification for its war long enough to create the conditions necessary for successful conclusion of that war. The men and women who are directing this administration’s war policy have sublimated winning the peace in Iraq to winning election next year and the likely result is that they will lose both.