From dictator to disaster - death toll rises in Iraq

This is almost too stunning to comprehend. WaPo reports that 1,300 Iraqi citizens have died in the last week and that's not counting the toll from the bombing of the shrine that started this latest wave of violence.

Hundreds of unclaimed dead lay at the morgue at midday Monday -- blood-caked men who had been shot, knifed, garroted or apparently suffocated by the plastic bags still over their heads. Many of the bodies were sprawled with their hands still bound -- and many of them had wound up at the morgue after what their families said was their abduction by the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

Sadr denies it's his men, calling it a smear campaign but whoever is behind it, how can anyone reasonably deny that this country is in a civil war and it started because we deposed a dictator -- who was no direct threat to us -- that was keeping order there? Saddam was a cruel man but can we honestly say the Iraqis are better off for our having deposed him?

Remarkably, the war hawks (chicken and otherwise) still shill for staying the course, arguing we can't draw down the troops in the face of this chaos. But what good are we doing? It would be political suicide to intervene directly in this intercine warfare, even if we were able to discern who the good guys actually are, which we can't. By all indications, our support is merely facilitating the rampaging militias who exact their retribution under the guise of the "legitimate" government that we're propping up and our mere presence as foreign occupiers provides the only common enemy the Iraqis can agree on.