Today Sen Reid ended his press conference with the following comment:

Reid: Feingold/Reid called for American troops to remain in Iraq to do counter-terrorsim…to protect our assets in Iraq. To train the Iraqis. There are estimates that that would still leave tens of thousands of troops to stay in Iraq. No one is calling for precipitous withdrawal in Iraq. No one…

In response, I received a message from some friends who are in Iraq at the moment. (These friends have extensive military experience but not with US forces.) They ask a terrifying question: "How many tens of thousands are the US willing to see killed - tens of thousands of US troops that is?"

They are asking us to take this seriously - they believe that no matter what routes are picked, the US forces will have to fight their way out. They cannot believe that no one seems to understand how truly bad the situation is - and how many US soldiers are going to die as the whole situation implodes - and how completely untenable are any troops left in Iraq.

One contact wrote this weekend that the mood in Iraq is no longer just a desire to see the US leave - but to hurt the US troops as much as possible as they leave as payback for episodes such as the one I wrote about last night at Firedoglake.

They believe that what we have seen so far has been testing and preparation for greatly increased attacks on US troops esp as the surge tactics have spread them in vulnerable ways. To get a feel for the situation, one example: the US/MNF this weekend boasted about a successful shipment of water by air to one base. This means that the MNF is having trouble even moving an essential like water - see Main and Central's analysis. At the same time, remember that tanks get only 1.8 MPG (and less in real world conditions) but there are reports that there's even a gas shortage in the Green Zone itself. Add in the campaign to destroy all the bridges on major routes and you begin to see the level of disaster shaping up.

Things are moving fast in Iraq - Maliki has lost all pull and is expected to lose the no confidence vote, the oil bill is causing things to break faster (as one writer at Azzaman asked - "why should we trade an economic occupation for a military one"). These contacts are saying that Iraq is devolving into a completely failed state, all pretense of central government collapsing, large numbers of Turkish troops (CNN says 30K or so, Iraqi sources say 140K) on Northern border sorting out whether to attack the PKK in Iraq before or after the Turkish election, Iran is allied with Turkey in opposing PKK, Kurdish forces are conducting ethnic cleansing, movement by major tribal sheiks is increasing and the call has gone out from both Sunni and Shia political and religious leaders for the people to arm themselves as the government is no longer able to protect the ummah. The message here is that the Ayatollah's are close to calling for jihad against the US forces - jumping on Al Sadr's bandwagon. This is just a quick list off the top of my head ... there's more.

We are in for a whole world of hurt - and it appears that the debates in DC are very far removed from what these observers see as reality on the ground.

Or as one just wrote a few minutes ago:

this is not vietnam"
"its afghanistan"
"and you're the soviets"