Gee, it sure was a great idea to invade Iraq

Is it just me, or does it look like the the situation in Iraq is completely fucked? Every article I read on the latest violence is confusing because they are tryng to sum up the situation in a few short paragraphs, but there was so much violence across the country yesterday that it can't be easily summed up. The Guardian, though, tries:

A wave of violence exceptional even by Iraq's standards spread across the country yesterday, leaving at least nine coalition troops dead and dozens more injured and raising fresh concerns about security less than three months before the handover of power to an Iraqi government.

The rest of the article, which is short, cites 200 injured in Kufa, oil pipeline "set alight" in southern Iraq, protests spread across southern cities and a Shia neighborhood in Baghdad where 7 troops died, bombings in Samarra and Kirkuk... One reading this senses that chaos just broke out across Iraq yesterday, and you have to wonder (worry) if this will continue.

Taking Points Memo reminds us that it's the Shia, not just Sunni's, who have become militant.

Violence from the Sunni areas has never been difficult to understand. They lost out on privileges and status when Saddam was overthrown. And the future looked even more bleak, because the eventual handover of authority to a democratically elected government all but insured the domination of the Shia majority which the Sunnis had been lording it over for decades if not centuries.

In other words, time was never on the side of the Sunni rejectionists. From the start their interests were in destabilizing and delegitimizing the occupation.

Time, however, was very much on the side of the Shia. From a cynical viewpoint, why not let their American and Sunni enemies bloody each other into exhaustion in the central Iraq and sit back and wait on the day -- not too distant, certainly -- when they would inherit the new Iraqi state?

Why are some of the Shia attacking when they had the political advantage? That's a good question, one I'm not qualified to answer. But seeing the new bouts of violence coming from the populace leads us to a question we can all answer: Can we lead a successful military operation in a country where the populace hates us enough to fight us?