A poll, conducted by the Iraq Centre for Research and Strategic Studies and the Gulf Research Center, reports that nine out of ten Iraqis feel that the situation in their country was better under Saddam Hussein than it is now. (The poll was conducted before Saddam was hanged.) Here are the results:

Do you feel the situation in the country is better today or better before the U.S.-led invasion?

Better today 5%

Better before 90%

Not sure 5%

Pat Robertson, the apparently mentally deranged preacher-man, has predicted "mass killing" in the United States in 2007, by terrorists. He says that God has warned him, personally, about it, but that "the Lord didn't say [it would] be nuclear." Apparently, the Lord thought it was better to tell Pat about this than, say, Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security. From USA Today:

In what has become an annual tradition of prognostications, religious broadcaster Pat Robertson said Tuesday God has told him that a terrorist attack on the United States would result in "mass killing" late in 2007.

"I'm not necessarily saying it's going to be nuclear," he said during his news-and-talk television show "The 700 Club" on the Christian Broadcasting Network. "The Lord didn't say nuclear. But I do believe it will be something like that."

Robertson said God told him during a recent prayer retreat that major cities and possibly millions of people will be affected by the attack, which should take place sometime after September.

Robertson said God also told him that the U.S. only feigns friendship with Israel and that U.S. policies are pushing Israel toward "national suicide."

Jim Hoagland, the neocon-oriented Post columnist and long-time Middle East watcher, is the first to suggest (in his column today) that Iraq's resistance is getting ready to declare a government:

Bush now faces the prospect of an insurgent "government" declaring control over Anbar province and other Sunni-dominated areas in a matter of months -- with open support from Iraq's Arab neighbors -- if trends continue.

This is an important, but very complicated issue. Such a government would not be the same as the separatist, Islamist "republic" that the remnants of Al Qaeda in Iraq promoted last year. If it emerges, with (as Hoagland suggests) with the "open support" of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and even Syria, it would be a massive step toward regional war. If Hoagland is right that such an event could occur in months, it is something that ought to be getting a lot more attention.

Lots of Democrats are criticizing The Surge, but I was struck by this from Steny Hoyer, not exactly a militant anti-war activist and the man who will be the Democrats' majority leader:

"If he goes forward with the idea presumably it means he thinks it will have a positive effect," said incoming House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, a Maryland Democrat.

"But of course the president has been almost uniformly wrong on what his premise is, of what his actions in Iraq were going to result in, whether it is cost or success, stabilization, support, sectarian violence," Hoyer said. "You name it, their observations have been wrong."

Gotta give Senator Joe Biden some credit for this one. In an interview with the Post, Biden said that Bush and Cheney know that the war in Iraq is "lost" and that they just don't want to "be the guy landing helicopters inside the Green Zone, taking people off the roof," a la Saigon, 1975. More quotes:

"I have reached the tentative conclusion that a significant portion of this administration, maybe even including the vice president, believes Iraq is lost," Biden said. "They have no answer to deal with how badly they have screwed it up. I am not being facetious now. Therefore, the best thing to do is keep it from totally collapsing on your watch and hand it off to the next guy -- literally, not figuratively."

Of course, Biden is not exactly right that there is nothing the Senate can do. Practically speaking, though, he's right that the most likely path to end the war is when Republican senators "walk away" from Bush's Iraq policy, and go down to the White House and tell the president it's time to get out.

"There is nothing a United States Senate can do to stop a president from conducting his war," Biden said. "The only thing that is going to change the president's mind, if he continues on a course that is counterproductive, is having his party walk away from his position."

Biden said that Vice President Cheney and former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld "are really smart guys who made a very, very, very, very bad bet, and it blew up in their faces. Now, what do they do with it? I think they have concluded they can't fix it, so how do you keep it stitched together without it completely unraveling?"

Set aside the sheer irony that the United States is fighting with heavy weapons, helicopters and F-15s less than a mile from the Green Zone in Baghdad. What happened this week in the Haifa Street area of Baghdad is this: the sectarian, Shiite-run puppet government of Iraq enlisted the United States in an escalation of its own bloody ethnic cleansing of west Baghdad.

The full force of U.S. military power was brought to bear on a Sunni civilian neighborhood in the center of the city. Dozens were killled. Here is an utterly stupid quote from the U.S. colonel on the scene:

"It's an area that needed to be brought back under Iraqi security control," said Lieutenant Colonel Scott Bleichwehl, a US military spokesman. "There is a progression of missions that are ongoing. It's not against any particular group or militia. Most of it is driven by the Iraqi government."

Driven by the Iraqi government? Yes--but the Iraqi government is in the hands of fanatical militamen and the Shiite fundamentalists associated with Islamic Dawa, SCIRI, and others. Not directed against any particular group? It was aimed squarely at the Sunni mainstream.

Harith al-Dari, the leader of the Association of Muslim Scholars, called the operation "a bloody sectarian massacre." (The AMS, a Sunni group, calls itself the political wing of the armed resistance in Iraq.) Many Iraqi politicians from the Sunni community, including the Iraqi Islamic Party -- whose leader just visited the White House -- denounced the U.S. operation.

Following the U.S. raid that demolished a headquarters of the National Dialogue Front, a Sunni political party whose leader has been trying to broker national reconciliation talks with the resistance, it appears utterly clear that the Bush "surge" in Iraq will be aimed at purging Baghdad of the Sunni insurgency, leaving the Shiite fundamentalists intact and in control.