In Iraq, dying prematurely happens hundreds of times daily. But the killing of up to 25 Iraqi civilians by private Blackwater contractors set off a firestorm in both Baghdad and Washington. It also, not coincidentally, showed just how irrelevant the Iraqi government is. Prime Minister Maliki immediately condemned the killings, yanked Blackwater's operating license, and ordered its personnel to leave the country--a move summarily ignored by the US, as without private contractors our heavily privatized military effort would grind to a halt. (And besides, US contractors are immune to Iraqi law.) Iraqis were so enraged by the murders that US personnel were confined to the Green Zone for four days anyway.

BBC/ABC/NHK polling showed just how unpopular the Americans are after the "success" of the escalation surge. The results were grim enough in Iraq as a whole: 70 percent of Iraqis think security is worse in escalation surge areas now compared to before it began. (Another 11 percent thought it unchanged.) A whopping 60 percent now think attacks on US troops are justified. But in Anbar Province, scene of the escalation surge's greatest "success," it was worse:

"72 percent in Anbar expressed no confidence whatsoever in United States forces. Seventy-six percent said the United States should withdraw now--up from 49 percent in March, and far above the national average. Every Anbar respondent in our survey opposed the presence of American forces in Iraq--69 percent "strongly" so. Every Anbar respondent called attacks on coalition forces "acceptable," far more than anywhere else in the country. All called the United States-led invasion wrong, including 68 percent who called it 'absolutely wrong.'"

Every. Anbar. Respondent. So much for winning hearts and minds.

Less covered than the Blackwater killings, but more significant, was the withdrawal last week of Moktada al-Sadr's parliamentary allies from Maliki's ruling coalition--not only splitting the Shiites, but leaving Maliki with less than half of parliament in his camp. Who's left? The Kurds and the Shiite exile parties (SCIRI and Dawa) with little constituency in Iraq itself. If Iraq had a, you know, functioning government that followed the law, this would end Maliki's rule; if you want to get all technical and stuff, without a ruling majority, his leadership (sic) is now illegal. But this won't happen, for two reasons: first, Parliament rarely has a quorum, and second, the opposition can't agree on anything anyway. Iraq's "government" is a joke.

How irrelevant is it? Perhaps the biggest Iraq story got almost no media play here: the oil deal cut by the Kurdish provincial government with Hunt Oil Co. of Dallas. Why is this a big deal? First, it means local governments are starting to ignore the Green Zone government entirely and cut their own deals, a death knell for the oil "revenue-sharing" law that is perhaps the US government's biggest benchmark for political "success" in Iraq. It also suggests Big Oil is betting on the failure of the US mission in Iraq and the formal partitioning of the country. The deal itself (along with one the Kurds recently cut for natural gas) makes that partitioning more likely.

The British polling agency ORB, in surveying Iraqi families to find how many had members who've died in the occupation and war, estimated that overall a staggering 1.2 million or more Iraqi civilians have been killed so far. That number is roughly in line with the widely ridiculed 655,000 number published in an epidemiological study in The Lancet summer of 2006, confirming not only that the civilian death toll has been far higher than official estimates, but that the violence has worsened sharply in the last year.

In the latest confirmation of just how bad the internal refugee crisis has become, a Red Crescent report says that not only have two million people fled their homes, but a staggering one million of those are in Baghdad alone. What does that mean? Ethnic cleansing. Baghdad was one of the most ethnically diverse provinces in Iraq; all those people have been leaving because death squads would no longer allow neighborhoods to be mixed. Sunnis have all but been driven out of Baghdad, part of the de facto partitioning of Iraq that has already happened, much of it while the escalation surge was supposed to be putting an end to the problem.

More bad news in the "Iraqi Life Is Cheap" Dept.: Northern Iraq's cholera epidemic, which has now struck some 5,000 people, has spread to both Baghdad and Basra, with first cases confirmed in both cities. Cholera is a disease that happens only when there's no safe drinking water and the public health infrastructure has broken down completely--conditions more than met throughout Occupied Iraq.

In the "But Life Is Cheaper In D.C." Dept., Congress continued showing its priorities last week, spending ample time debating the appropriateness of a newspaper ad while Republicans blocked measures to address the war itself. In the Senate, the Reid-Feingold bill to cut off funding in June failed 28-70 (Patty Murray voted yes, Maria Cantwell, no). The Senate also rejected Sen. Jim Webb's bill to give troops equal time at home, 56-44, short of the 60 votes needed to break the Republican filibuster. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that even drawing down to 55,000 troops in Iraq (a proposal on nobody's table), George Bush's perpetual war would cost $25 billion a year, or up to two trillion dollars overall. Those numbers actually seem low. And the ever-busy Rep. Henry Waxman has a new target in his oversight investigations: State Department Inspector General Howard Krongard, who Waxman accuses of cover-ups in investigations of waste and fraud in private contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The organization representing Foreign Service diplomats has joined in, calling on Krongard to resign.

Gen. David "Ass-Kissing Little Chickenshit" Petraeus spread it thick over Congress this month, touting "success" in Iraq (as did the Ass-Kissee-in-Chief in a nationally televised address) and dominating American media headlines. But even the Pentagon report accompanying Gen. AKLC's testimony undercut it. That showed that even by the administration's extremely generous definition, only half of Congress's 18 benchmarks showed "progress," exactly one more than in an interim report in July. Meanwhile, a separate State Department report, also quietly released in a Friday Afternoon News Dump, revealed that--surprise!--religious freedom in Iraq is down sharply in the last year.

Somehow, this all is being spun as "success," and Bush is now promising a "withdrawal" to celebrate it--next Spring, six months past schedule, back to pre-escalation surge troop levels because the US military can't sustain its current deployment without either extending tours (again) or starting a draft. Or maybe Bush will just send our exhausted soldiers to Iran. That propaganda campaign also continued apace, with the US claiming that a fatal mortar attack on US military headquarters was carried out with an Iranian rocket. The US also arrested an Iranian trade diplomat in northern Iraq and accused him of smuggling IEDs into the country. The Kurdish government, which was hosting the man, protested strongly, but to no avail. And in the week's most surreal bit of Iran-bashing, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, set to be in New York this week for the opening of the UN General Assembly, was refused permission by the US to lay a wreath at the World Trade Center. Why? Well, the request angered US diplomats, who accused the Iranian leader of--gasp--"wanting to use Ground Zero as a photo-op."

Well, if that's the criteria.