The war grinds on. The fantasy that expected the Iraqis to roll out the red carpet for their American liberators has been dashed. Nobody expects that Iraq will be able to repulse the U.S. invasion, but the level and form of resistance pretty much guarantees that eventually the U.S. will leave Iraq without having accomplished anything more notable than the perverse satisfaction of serving up Saddam's head on some platter.

As I said earlier, the level of resistance will be telling. If you want a rule of thumb for neocolonialist wars of occupation, it's that once you can't tell your friends from your enemies in the native population, you're fucked. At its simplest level, that's because the occupiers get nervous and make mistakes. The mistakes, in turn, compound, pushing more and more people from the friendly side to the hostile side. That in turn reinforces the nervousness, the mistakes, the alienation. In turn, the resistance gets bolder; as this happens, the occupation digs in, becoming more brutal, vicious, capricious. The high-minded rhetoric is exposed as pure hypocrisy, and the occupation becomes more nakedly about nothing more than power. Such wars become vastly unpopular, and eventually the occupier has to cut their losses and go home. This is pretty much what happened in Vietnam, and we're going to be hearing a lot more about the similarity as this war bogs down.

Still, I think there are a couple of differences from Vietnam. That the Iraqis don't have the Soviet Union and China resupplying them with bullets is probably one difference that won't matter much: even without a foreign sponsor (and don't forget that neighboring Iran and Syria are near the top of the U.S. hit list), Iraq has learned a thing or two about smuggling during the sanctions years. That the Iraqis will take refuge in cities rather than the countryside is another difference, one that might make them more effective, at least in the sense of amplifying even small acts of resistance. But on the other hand, the U.S. is different too: there is a lot of reason to believe that the U.S. military really didn't want to get into this war, and that American soldiers really don't want to take the risks associated with policing Iraq. It's also clear that the U.S. people really didn't want to get into this war, and that opposition both in the U.S. and abroad will be relentless. It's also the case that the U.S. economy really cannot afford this kind of war, not just in direct costs and terrorism risk but because it significantly risks U.S. business interests all around the world. It's also the case that this war is going to be very visible -- the whole "embedded press" thing has already backfired several times.

So, let's face it, the U.S. war against Iraq is a colossal failure. The only question remaining is how long it will take the U.S. to give up and get out, and how much destruction the U.S. will leave in its wake. So remember this: This war did not have to happen. No one who has died, been injured, been captured, been terrorized by this war had to suffer. This only happened because of one mad tyrant: George W. Bush. Even today, if sanity were to suddenly overcome him, all he'd have to do is seize fire and order the troops home. Every day, every minute that he does not do this just adds to the grossness of his crime.