Democratic Rep. John Murtha has a pretty good piece today in the Washington Post on our failure in Iraq.  It is at its most effective in the second half, when he just lists blunt statistics to show where we are after so much blood and treasure lost.  Read, weep:


Despite the presence of more than 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, 23,000 Americans injured or killed, tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths and the expenditure of nearly a half a trillion dollars, here are the dismal results:

· In September, 776 U.S troops were wounded in Iraq, the highest monthly toll in more than two years.

· Over the past year, the number of attacks against U.S. personnel has doubled, rising from 400 to more than 800 per week.

· Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, recently acknowledged that sectarian violence has replaced the insurgency as the single biggest threat to Iraq.

· In the past two months, 6,000 Iraqis died, more than in the first year of the war.

· Last week, electricity output averaged 2.4 hours per day in Baghdad and 10.4 hours nationwide — 7 percent less than in the same period in 2005.

· A Sept. 27 World Public Opinion poll indicated that 91 percent of Iraqi Sunnis and 74 percent of Iraqi Shiites want the Iraqi government to ask U.S.-led forces to withdraw within a year.  Ninety-seven percent of Sunnis and 82 percent of Shiites said that the U.S. military presence is "provoking more conflict than it is preventing."  And Iraqi support for attacks against U.S.-led forces has increased sharply over the past few months, from 47 percent to 61 percent.


So it's not just a sustained level of violence, civil war, poverty, quality-of-life degradation, etc.—it gets worse every fucking year we're there.

Murtha also makes a noble, necessary admission: