Pogroms

Thanks Oh Wise Men of Washington. Thank you St. McCain. Thank you Last Honest Man. Thanks oh Glorious Keepers of the Flame of the Vital Center. Thanks Jon "Beware the Dirty Fucking Hippies" Chait. Thank you Richard Cohen and Margaret "Whatever Colin does, I’ll go with" Carlson. Thank you oh self-glorifying stewards of our national discourse for sending us down this path. Thank you Joe Lieberman Weekly for being wrong about everything all the time, and therefore making it easy for me to choose a direction every morning.

Pogroms.

The U.S. military is no longer able to defeat a bloody insurgency in western Iraq or counter al-Qaeda's rising popularity there, according to newly disclosed details from a classified Marine Corps intelligence report that set off debate in recent months about the military's mission in Anbar province.

The Marines recently filed an updated version of that assessment that stood by its conclusions and stated that as of mid-November, the problems in troubled Anbar province have not improved, a senior U.S. intelligence official said yesterday. "The fundamental questions of lack of control, growth of the insurgency and criminality" remain the same, the official said.

The Marines' August memo, a copy of which was shared with The Washington Post, is far more bleak than some officials suggested when they described it in late summer. The report describes Iraq's Sunni minority as "embroiled in a daily fight for survival," fearful of "pogroms" by the Shiite majority and increasingly dependent on al-Qaeda in Iraq as its only hope against growing Iranian dominance across the capital.