"This Entire Place Is Literally Rigged."

Today's Michael Gordon report from Baquba captures some of the inherent difficulty of the war in Iraq. It's their country, not ours. All they have to do is run away, or booby-trap everything. We run out of serious troop levels next spring. They stay for ever, and show no sign of any willingness to make the political compromises necessary to become anything other than a failed state. And so the hideous violence and chaos continues. In some ways, Baquba is a metaphor for the entire enterprise:

The insurgent strategy appeared to be to use deep-buried bombs under the road and small-arms fire to force the soldiers to take refuge in the houses adjoining the route and then to blow them up. Col. Steve Townsend, the commander of the Third Stryker Brigade Combat Team, Second Infantry Division, which carried out the assault on western Baquba, said the network of house bombs here was the most extensive he had seen in Iraq. He said that in the first seven days of the attack, the brigade destroyed 21 house bombs. The platoon had encountered more than its share...

"I don't know how realistic it is to ask for this, but I really think we could destroy this block, not cause any damage to the civilian populace and reduce a lot of risk to ourselves," Lieutenant Morton said over the tactical radio. "This entire place is literally rigged."

Indeed.