How informative---and depressing---it is to juxtapose three news stories on Iraq that ran in the last two days in The Washington Post.

• "Militias on the Rise Across Iraq: Shiite and Kurdish Groups Seizing Control, Instilling Fear in North and South," by Anthony Shadid and Steve Fainaru, which ran in the Sunday (August 21) Post, details how the Kurds in northern Iraq and the Shia in the south are consolidating control over their respective regions. In both areas, the article notes, "The militias, and the Shiite and Kurdish parties that control them, are creating their own institutions of authority, unaccountable to elected governments. ... The parties and their armed wings sometimes operate independently, and other times as part of Iraqi army and police units trained and equipped by the United States and Britain and controlled by the central government. Their growing authority has enabled them to control territory, confront their perceived enemies and provide patronage to their followers."
• "Iraq Parliament Delays Constitution Vote: Drafters Given Three More Days to Work Out Differences," by Ellen Knickmeyer, Jonathan Finer and William Branigin, describes how the delegates charged with writing a new Iraqi constitution delivered a draft to the National Assembly yesterday, only to be told that since key issues remained unresolved, they were being given three more days to reach a final agreement. The critical remaining issues are how much autonomy to grant the Kurds and the Shia---"the draft constitution would fundamentally change Iraq, transforming the country into a loose federation"---and how much authority to accord to Islamic law---"The draft ... stipulates that Iraq is an Islamic state and that no law can contradict the principles of Islam. ... The draft calls for the presence of Islamic clerics on the court that would interpret the constitution."
• "Bush Defends Strategy in Iraq at Veterans' Convention," by William Branigin, reports on Bush's speech yesterday to the V.F.W. national convention in Salt Lake City. Telling the veterans that the only acceptable outcome in Iraq is "total victory over the terrorists and their hateful ideology," the President appealed again to 9/11 to justify his Iraq policy: "Terrorists in foreign lands still hope to attack our country. They still hope to kill our citizens. The lesson of September 11th, 2001, is that we must confront threats before they fully materialize. A policy of retreat and isolation will not bring us safety. The only way to defend our citizens where we live is go after the terrorists where they live." He described his "comprehensive strategy to win this war on terror" as having three parts, "protecting this homeland, taking the fight to the enemy, and advancing freedom," and he concluded by linking his policy to America's great 20th Century struggles against totalitarianism: "Freedom has contended with hateful ideologies before. We defeated fascism. We defeated Communism. And we will defeat the hateful ideology of the terrorists who attacked America."

It is instructive to read these three stories in quick succession. The first two send a clear signal: the situation on the ground in Iraq makes the constitution writers in Baghdad nearly irrelevant. Since before the U.S. invasion, the Kurds have controlled their own autonomous region in northern Iraq, which they have expanded in the aftermath of our invasion. They are not going to give up any of their gains. The Shia are consolidating control of a similar region in southern Iraq. They, too, will insist on retaining the authority they now have and on instituting Islamic law in their area, with the result that southern Iraq will become an Islamic autonomous region with close ties to Iran. The best outcome we can hope for is that the Sunnis accept the diminution of their power that is a chief result of our invasion and see the wisdom of converting their insurgents into a militia that controls the central regions where they predominate and that all three groups acquiesce in supporting a weak central government, which controls Baghdad and the immediate vicinity. The worst and perhaps most likely outcome is a Mesopotamian Yugoslavia.

Then there's our President. Wind him up, and out spew the familiar lines about 9/11, protecting the homeland, total victory over terrorism, and advancing freedom everywhere. What world is he living in? Can't he see that we're in big trouble in Iraq? You want to shake him till he levels with the American people and tells us how we're going to get out of there.

Bush's hubris in invading Iraq and incompetence in occupying it have combined to produce an impending disaster. Surely he knows that, to say the least, things are not going well, yet instead of acknowledging, analyzing, and confronting the difficulties, his response is to invoke the difficulties we Americans have overcome in our glorious past, as though faith alone were sufficient to overcome all difficulties. Therein perhaps lies the answer to the puzzle. Maybe he really doesn't see where we're headed in Iraq, because he is living in a different world, a world where faith and invocations of faith are all that matter.

An alternative explanation is that Bush is deliberately lying to us about the situation in Iraq. That would be better than being clueless, because he might be taking some effective actions that we don't know about. For tonight, however, I'm leaning toward the idea that he lives in his own world, a tightly insulated shell where he constructs his own reality, where he stubbornly refuses to confront and deal with the actual situation in Iraq. How sad and depressing it is to think that the President might be the last person to get the message that his adventure in Iraq has failed. Who will be the last to die in a war whose futility the President is the last to recognize?

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