Michelle Malkin is a journalist, but she is not a reporter. She's as partisan on the right as Michael Moore is on the left. I'm not surprised that she went to Iraq and saw what she wanted to see, if indeed she isn't just spinning it.

It would be really nice if she were right, but we have heard this many times before. There's always light at the end of the tunnel. "Villes" were flattened in Vietnam and the insurgency still won. Every Iraqi knows that the foreigners, who don't even bother to learn Arabic, will be gone one day. Then, they'll have to rely on their own ethnic militias. The Mahdi Army is actually doing a better job protecting Shi'ites than the US Army is, and the Shi'ites know it. Plus, they know the Mahdi Army is going to be on their side in ten days and in ten years, whereas the Marines may be entering Sadr City tomorrow, guns blazing, and will be leaving Iraq altogether long before the violence ends.

I'll be reading and listening to the stories from journalists not tainted with partisan dogma in the coming months. Bush is going to implement his plan, and I hope and expect that the worst actors will be reined in somewhat for a while. But it will not pacify Iraq or stop the civil war. Journalists who were in Vietnam and Iraq say that the latter is far worse in terms of Westerners being able to move around. They have to do a lot more than Malkin did if they are to find out anything about what's really happening.

Baghdad is the biggest place where Sunnis and Shia live in the same area. It naturally is ground zero for the civil war, and ethnic cleansing on a massive scale is occurring before our eyes, with our troops on the ground powerless to stop it. Other mixed areas are experiencing violence as well. I don't know if there was any way to have prevented this after the horrible mistake of invading was made, but now it's got a momentum of its own. All we can do is referee or take sides. Neither will end the carnage. Most Iraqis say they want us out. They think the situation will improve with our troops gone. I think they're probably wrong, unless what they mean by "improvement" is that they'll crush the other side in a civil war. But it's their country, isn't it? We owe them big time for what we've wrought, but the occupation is not settling the debt, just compounding it. We ought to get out as soon as possible.