CBS correspondent Lara Logan, who along with other American reporters risks her life anew every time she returns to Iraq, is back there again. Discussing what she sees with Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation (the only halfway decent Sunday morning talk show/news broadcast) yesterday morning, she says there has been a change for the worse even between her last stint a few months ago and this one. The area of Baghdad is being turned into rubble, the desert is reclaiming the city, and the road from the airport looks like "Armageddon."

A similar and equally valid message from former CIA officer Larry Johnson:

"The last 11 months in Iraq are the bloodiest since the United States invaded in March of 2003.  Despite a troop surge the violence is not abating and our troops are not more secure.   Our losses in Iraq are significant.  Since March of 2003 we have lost 44 battalions worth of soldiers and marines (a battalion is a unit of 300 to 1,000 soldiers. Four to six companies make up a battalion.  I am using the figure of 650, a combat arms battalion.)  And the trend in Iraq is alarming--we are losing more, not less. . .

"Last week a friend of mine, a senior U.S. military commander who has multiple combat tours in Iraq, gave me an update on the readiness of his branch of the service: 'Running the [unit] is a blast even though I'm doing it with about 30% of what I rate.  Real tragedy is that we're doing systemic damage to our [troops] operating at the high OPTEMPO and sustained rate for as long as we are'."    

Meanwhile,

(1) The Democrats in Congress -- or far too many of them -- caved in and did far too little to stop the GOP and the White House, instead of forcing a pull-out in Iraq, which is their only viable option.

(2) The so-called "funding bill" apparently requires that Iraq negotiate longterm contracts with Big Oil. The best conceivable scenario at this point is that the rest of the world will join together sufficiently to enable Iraq to reject the deal -- by making its oil deals with other nations instead.

(3) The administration is moving more troops into harm's way in the vicinity of Iran, while increasing the noisy saber-rattling against Iran. Another USS Cole attack is being connived at.

(4) The drain on US military resources pointed out by Johnson and others serves as the perfect excuse to reinstate a military draft.

(5) And Bush just signed the weirdest presidential directive in history. More on that later; for now, the one bit of good news about it is that at least it constitutes new grounds for impeachment.