Is the battle for Baghdad lost before the surge even arrives?

Actually, the whole thing sounds like one more of Dubya's patented neocon clusterf*ks.

Jeff Huber at Pen and Sword

The battle for Baghdad appears to be lost even as it starts. From Damien Cave and Richard A. Oppel Jr. of the New York Times:

BAGHDAD, Feb. 5--A growing number of Iraqis are saying that the United States is to blame for creating conditions that led to the worst single suicide bombing in the war, which devastated a Shiite market in Baghdad on Saturday. They argued that the Americans had been slow in completing the vaunted new American security plan, making Shiite neighborhoods much more vulnerable to such horrific attacks.

They started the battle without the additional troops they said they needed to fight it. Hmm. Where have we seen that happen before?

And they took down significant portions of the Mahdi Army who were protecting the Shiite neighborhoods without enough regular forces to fill the security void. The U.S. "surge" is moving too slowly and, according to Naeem al-Kabbi, the deputy mayor of Baghdad, "the Iraqi Army is not ready."

The Iraqi Army is not ready?

Is this Iraq fiasco starting to look like the movie Groundhog Day or what?

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