While the DC talk this week (see lead article, this issue) is being dominated by a cynically disingenuous "assessment" of whether the escalation surge is working, and whether American forces should ever withdraw from Iraq, the Brits actually did withdraw. The last British soldiers pulled out of Basra last week, leaving Southern Iraq nominally under the control of the Iraqi Army, more realistically under the control of three mutually warring fundamentalist Shiite militias, and almost certainly about to receive American troops who will push the chaos from one neighborhood, village, and province to another. What's it like now? Fifty-two people died in late August in Karbala firefights (widely reported in the US as "riots") between members of Moktada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army and the Maliki-aligned Badr Organization, both Shiite militias vying for control (and wider imposition of sharia law) in the Brits' absence. After the fighting, al-Sadr ordered the Mahdi Army to stand down for six months to try to avoid widening the civil war. We'll see how long it lasts. Prime Minister Maliki, the great American-sponsored statesman, blamed Sunni clerics from Saudi Arabia for somehow provoking the Karbala bloodshed, in an effort to deflect attention from his Badr friends. This is our voice of political reconciliation during the escalation surge.

Another important front is (finally) emerging in coverage of Iraq: a widening scandal over corruption and where all that American money and weaponry has actually been going for four years. McClatchy newspapers reported that hundreds of thousands of dollars in US rebuilding money went to insurgents (still only a fraction of the billions that went missing overall). The Army accused Lee Dynamics International of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to US officials to get $11 million in contracts. The New York Times reported that several federal agencies are investigating weapons sales, disappearances, fraud, kickbacks, and black market profiteering by US officials. And one investigation involves senior official who worked with a Gen. David Petraeus--yes, that Gen. Petraeus--when he was heading the effort to arms and train Iraqi militias and death squads army and police units in 2004-05. (Heckuva job, Davie.) Also from the Times: US weapons given to the Iraqi army are being found used by criminal gangs in Turkey. (No surprise there; we've flooded the black market in arms the world over by handing out AK-47s etc. like candy in Iraq.) And, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Paul Brinkley (another political appointee) was accused last week by a DoD task force of mismanaging government money in Iraq--and also engaging in public drunkenness and sexual harassment.

Big picture: The Project on Government Oversight reported that the top 50 Iraq contractors paid over $12 billion in fines and restitution for violating various federal laws over the last 10 years. Being scofflaws not only hasn't disqualified them from the Iraq feeding trough, but seems to be an entrance requirement.

While folks concerned with Iraq awaited a report that was probably written in Cheney's office a month ago, the ACLU filed suit last week to try to obtain Pentagon estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths. After denying for years that the US government tracked Iraqi civilian deaths at all (what's another dead Iraqi?), the Pentagon finally confirmed earlier this year that it does, in fact, produce intelligence estimates of civilian casualties--but has refused to make them public, just as it has refused to make public the secret formula by which it is calculating, in defiance of every known metric, that overall violence is down in the country due to the escalation surge. Perhaps this week they'll let us in on the secret.

Finally, in the most unintentionally hilarious incident since Larry Craig got Restless Leg Syndrome, the US military characterized as "regrettable" a Baghdad incident last Tuesday in which eight Iranians, including two diplomats, were released hours after being arrested. In a country awash with guns and where security details are essential for normal travel for VIPs, the eight were singled out because the Iraqi security guys they'd hired had an "unauthorized" AK-47 and two pistols in the trunk of their car. Not entirely coincidentally, President Bush was in Reno that day, telling an American Legion convention that Iranians were arming the insurgency, as part of the steadily increasing PR campaign for a military strike on Iran--which several credible reports, including a chilling article in the Times of London, say will be massive and imminent. Attacking Iran would not only be illegal and immoral, but politically, militarily, and economically disastrous--the time to mount public opposition to this insanity is now. For citations and links on this column, e-mail info@eatthestate.org.