Riverbend of Baghdad Burning offers the following advice to America:

I sometimes get emails asking me to propose solutions or make suggestions. Fine. Today’s lesson: don’t rape, don’t torture, don’t kill and get out while you can- while it still looks like you have a choice… Chaos? Civil war? Bloodshed? We’ll take our chances- just take your Puppets, your tanks, your smart weapons, your dumb politicians, your lies, your empty promises, your rapists, your sadistic torturers and go.

Commentary from Iraqi webloggers aside, the news from Iraq is so bad today that Slate’s Today’s Papers skipped coming up with a pithy headline this morning. Instead they went with “President of Governing Council Killed.” It’s kind of hard to read the summary of today’s news and not think that we haven’t lost Iraq, period. As was widely suspected, we handed Fallujah over to the rebels; the Italians were run out of Nasiriyah by irregulars from the Mahdi Army and have responded by asking the US to lay off of Muqtada al-Sadr, and the current head of the interim government was blown up. Those things stand out from the daily drumbeat of murder and death and the ongoing revelations in the torture scandal. I can’t escape the feeling that if we insist upon staying in Iraq, it’s going to wind up turning into Chechnya.