Maureen Dowd has a new column out titled "There's no one for us to lose to in Iraq's Civil War".
And buried in Maureen's column is a rather disturbing metric.
"American Helicopters and Iraqi Troops did not arrive for two hours after Sunni gunmen began a siege on the Health Ministry controlled by the Shite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr....."
This attack was:
"..the deadliest sectarian attack in Baghdad since the US invaded."
There are always details, special reasons, and complex factors surrounding events such as this. And I know of none of the details. But I don't think it matters. In the end, the two hour reaction time speaks for itself.
Even with hundreds of billions of dollars spent, an occupying force of about 150,000 troops, the USAF, hundreds of thousands of "trained" Iraqi Troops, and a heavily fortified Green Zone right in downtown Baghdad, and we still can't project force or even protect the Government Institutions in downtown Baghdad. This is starting to sound like Mogadishu in Black Hawk Down.