The Question

The Pensacola News Journal today carries a long editorial reviewing the current status of things in Iraq, and finds not much to cheer about. "[W]hile U.S. troops carry the brunt of the fight against what is principally a Sunni insurgency, behind the scenes Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani -- Iraq's most influential religious leader -- might be winning the political fight."

Here's how a Sunni leader put it to The New York Times: "In my opinion, the country is now one led by the clerics, and the new political process in Iraq is made to allow those clerics and religious parties to govern Iraq."

Worse, he compared it to the theocracy imposed on Iran by Ayatollah Khomeini.

Sistani, reports say, has quietly and systematically frustrated U.S. efforts to create a broad-based, secular federal government. He has been a driving force behind an increasingly theocratic Iraq, both inside and outside government.

And how would The Decider react to this tragic product of his Iraq war-making? Though framed as a question, the PNJ leaves little doubt about the answer:

If an Islamic theocracy is what thousands of U.S. dead, tens of thousands wounded and the expenditure of hundreds of billions of American taxpayers' dollars accomplishes in the end -- is President Bush going to tell us it is success?

No one who has been paying attention can trust anything the Bush administration says anymore.