Goin' For Broke

Fixing the china shop...like they fixed Iraq...like they fixed New Orleans...like they'll fix...Iran.

Team Bush has been stepping in it...big time:

BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. officials were warned for more than two years that Shiite Muslim militias were infiltrating Iraq's security forces and taking control of neighborhoods, but they failed to take action to counteract it, Iraqi and American officials said.

Now American officials call the militias the primary security concern in Iraq, blaming them for more civilian deaths than the Sunni Muslim-based insurgency and demanding that the Iraqi government move quickly to stem their influence.

U.S. officials concede that they didn't act, in part because they were focused on fighting the Sunni-dominated insurgency and on recruiting and training Iraqi security forces.

"Last year, as we worked through the problem set, that (militias) wasn't a problem set we focused on," Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, the top American military spokesman, said at a recent news briefing.

U.S. inaction gave the militias, with support from Iran, time to become a major force inside and outside the Iraqi government, and American officials acknowledge that dislodging them now would be difficult.

Meanwhile, the Gulf Coast is STILL waiting for what should be a massive effort from the government. Behzad Yaghmaian, who, to be fair is a bit challanged when it comes to Gret Stet geography--he thinks the Lower 9th is "located close to the mouth of the Mississippi River"--nonetheless gets this dead on accurate:

While spending billions of dollars in Iraq, the federal government had yet to dispatch an army of civil engineers and construction workers to help fix or rebuild the destroyed homes, restart the schools and hospitals, and build the infrastructure that would make the return of the "evacuees" possible. Instead of government paid workers, the Ninth Ward was crowded with college students from across the country who spent their spring break in New Orleans to help those devastated by the hurricane. With bare hands, they removed rubble, selflessly fixed walls, painted, and worked day and night to compensate for the failures of their government. The scene of the tired young men and women in the Ninth Ward was a fresh reminder of the ideals that were still upheld by many Americans. At the same time, it demonstrated the neglect and failure, or perhaps the unwillingness to help on the part of the government of the richest nation in the world.

And Team Bush now thinks the answer is...to show their rapidly decaying fangs and rattle their increasingly rusty saber...at Iran.

Talk about sheer, undiluted, unadulterated lunacy.