Meanwhile, in Iraq...

Professor Juan Cole of the University of Michigan has his own blog. His area of expertise is the Arab world. We at the Blasphemy Blog have heard him on the news before, and we read his blog regularly; he is a dour individual and listening to him or reading him is always pretty depressing. He never has much good to say about the way things are going with U.S. foreign policy in the Arab world. This morning, though, he's being pretty pessimistic even for him.

For one thing, it appears that the creation of a new Iraqi Constitution is not going particularly well. The two dominant ethnic groups in the provisional Iraqi government are circulating two different versions of the Constitution. The U.S. ambassador has his own version, too. There will be a referendum on this thing in five weeks, but no one even knows what it says.

Also, there was a big offensive on the city of Tal Afar in the Nineva province of Iraq. This was a joint U.S./Iraqi operation, designed to root out insurgents. The town is now empty of insurgents, but it has also been emptied of pretty much everyone else. 400,000 regular Iraqi people are therefore now refugees, and relief agencies are feeling the strain. Refugee camps meant to hold 500 people now must accommodate 5,000. And the insurgents? They escaped through underground tunnels.

Oh, what a bad idea this was. War is always a bad idea, but this war appears to have been a particularly bad idea even for a war.