Here's where things seem to stand in Iraq:

-In less that three months, the US is supposedly handing power over to an Iraqi interim government. [el - Right now, there is no plan or agreement to whom.]

-In the Sunni Triangle, a lot of people obviously don't like the US.

-The majority of relatively moderate Shiites, led by Ayatollah Sistani, aren't too happy about the lack of elections prior to the establishment of Iraq's new regime.

-The more radical Shiites, whom firebrand Moqtada Sadr has been trying to rally, have just been given a boost by Bremer's decision to padlock one of their newspapers. (Juan Cole notes a large protest demo in Baghdad that was overshadowed by yesterday's news from Fallujah.)

-We're not far from spending $250 billion on operations in Iraq (counting the war itself and money not yet included in the President's budget request). That's compared to less than $2 billion on reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan, where al Qaeda did have a base. (Another tip of the hat to Cole for that trenchant point.)

-Condoleezza Rice, who was tasked last fall with overseeing America's postwar effort in Iraq, is a little distracted these days.

-Ahmed Chalabi, a crook who STILL has the ear of the DOD and hundreds of thousands in monthly payments from the US Treasury, money that helped buy trumped up stories of Iraq's WMD in the past, is still on track to become Iraq's Prime Minister. [el - Despite having 0.1% support and being the most distrusted leader in a British poll of Iraqis.]

-The American media, pushed by gleeful Democrats who are very good at scoring points against Bush's past mistakes but very bad at articulating how we get out of this mess, aren't paying much attention to any of this.

If you, like I, was an opponent of the Iraq War--because we didn't believe there was a connection between Iraq and 9-11 or al-Qaeda, because we didn't believe Saddam presented an imminent threat to the US, because we believed the UN inspections were steadily working to contain any WMD ambitions he might have, because we feared the post-war chaos and sectarian competition that would be unleashed inside Iraq (with us as the overseers), and because we felt that any humanitarian intervention to overthrow Saddam should have included a much broader UN-mandated coalition of forces--it's tempting to just sit back and watch Bush and Crew stew in their own juices. This mess is their creation, after all.