Iraqi blogger Riverbend is back after a few months hiatus. She's livid about the rape of Sabrine and the attempt to cast it as a Shia - Sunni issue. Her final paragraphs from the first linked post:

As the situation continues to deteriorate both for Iraqis inside and outside of Iraq, and for Americans inside Iraq, Americans in America are still debating on the state of the war and occupation- are they winning or losing? Is it better or worse.

Let me clear it up for any moron with lingering doubts: It’s worse. It’s over. You lost. You lost the day your tanks rolled into Baghdad to the cheers of your imported, American-trained monkeys. You lost every single family whose home your soldiers violated. You lost every sane, red-blooded Iraqi when the Abu Ghraib pictures came out and verified your atrocities behind prison walls as well as the ones we see in our streets. You lost when you brought murderers, looters, gangsters and militia heads to power and hailed them as Iraq’s first democratic government. You lost when a gruesome execution was dubbed your biggest accomplishment. You lost the respect and reputation you once had. You lost more than 3000 troops. That is what you lost America. I hope the oil, at least, made it worthwhile.

What a great headline for the Administration. One of the soldiers who raped an Iraqi girl and killed her and her family (background here) is sentenced to 100 years in prison.

Read the fine print. He's eligible for parole in ten years.

The soldier, Sgt. Paul E. Cortez, 24, also was given a dishonorable discharge. Sergeant Cortez will be eligible for parole in 10 years under the terms of his plea agreement.

...In his plea agreement, he said he had conspired with three other soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division to rape a 14-year-old girl, who was then killed with her parents and a younger sister.

The case made Last Night in Little Rock recall My Lai. TChris said it's an example of why the U.S. will never win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people.

It's good that the soldier was held accountable. This was an atrocity. And it's not certain he will be paroled in ten years. But a life sentence, it is not. Yet, four people died, including a young girl who was gang-raped.

I'm not feeling sorry for Sgt. Cortez.

Senate Republicans blocked a nonbinding resolution opposing the president's escalation of the war in Iraq. Senate Democrats have turned their attention to legislation that takes a more direct approach:

Key lawmakers, backed by party leaders, are drafting legislation that would effectively revoke the broad authority granted to the president in the days Saddam Hussein was in power, and leave U.S. troops with a limited mission as they prepare to withdraw.

Officials said Thursday the precise wording of the measure remains unsettled. One version would restrict American troops in Iraq to fighting al-Qaeda, training Iraqi army and police forces, maintaining Iraq's territorial integrity and otherwise proceeding with the withdrawal of combat forces.

The legislation would probably suffer a death by filibuster, and if it passed, would certainly be vetoed. Keeping pressure on Republicans and the White House to change the course of the failed, costly, and unpopular war is nonetheless a worthy end in itself. Senate obstructionists who face reelection in 2008 will have difficulty explaining why they should keep their jobs.

Bad news for the National Guard members who put their lives on hold to fight the president's war in Iraq: 14,000 of them are going back, joining the troop escalation.

National Guard officials told state commanders in Arkansas, Indiana, Oklahoma and Ohio last month that while a final decision had not been made, units from their states that had done previous tours in Iraq and Afghanistan could be designated to return to Iraq next year between January and June, the officials said.

The unit from Oklahoma, a combat brigade with one battalion currently in Afghanistan, had not been scheduled to go back to Iraq until 2010, and brigades from the other three states not until 2009. Each brigade has about 3,500 soldiers.

Whether they'll be properly equipped is an open question.

Capt. Christopher Heathscott, a spokesman for the Arkansas National Guard, said the state’s 39th Brigade Combat Team was 600 rifles short for its 3,500 soldiers and also lacked its full arsenal of mortars and howitzers.

Tony Blair has had enough.

Prime Minister Tony Blair will announce on Wednesday a new timetable for the withdrawal of British troops from Iraq, with 1,500 to return home in several weeks, the BBC reported.

The administration's spin: Blair's cut-and-run strategy is "a sign of success."

As readers of this blog know, I believe the way to end the US involvement in Iraq is to announce a date certain for ending funding of the war. There is much confusion on how such a strategy would succeed. I think the fundamental confusion is the failure to understand that to defund the war the Congress need not pass any legislation at all. It merely must REFRAIN from passing legislation that funds the war.

But here is the most important part of the equation - the Democratic leadership of the Congress must announce now the date certain when it will no longer fund the Iraq war. It must tell the American People now that the funding will end on x date, and that it is incumbent on the President to adjust his actions accordingly. It must tell the American People NOW that if the troops are left in the field AFTER the announced date it will be the President who has placed our troops in increased danger. It will be the President who does not support the troops.

This is simply shocking.

Behind the door of Army Spec. Jeremy Duncan's room, part of the wall is torn and hangs in the air, weighted down with black mold. When the wounded combat engineer stands in his shower and looks up, he can see the bathtub on the floor above through a rotted hole. The entire building, constructed between the world wars, often smells like greasy carry-out. Signs of neglect are everywhere: mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, stained carpets, cheap mattresses.

This is the world of Building 18, not the kind of place where Duncan expected to recover when he was evacuated to Walter Reed Army Medical Center from Iraq last February with a broken neck and a shredded left ear, nearly dead from blood loss. But the old lodge, just outside the gates of the hospital and five miles up the road from the White House, has housed hundreds of maimed soldiers recuperating from injuries suffered in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

John Aravosis of AmericaBlog expresses his outrage. So should we all.

Hashim Ibrahim Awad was an Iraqi civilian, a retired policeman, who was brutally killed in Hamdaniya, an area west of Baghdad. 7 marines and a navy medic were charged in the death.

Today, Marine Lance Cpl. Robert Pennington,one of the charged Marines pleaded guilty to "conspiracy to commit premeditated murder and kidnapping, and to a kidnapping charge. Other charges he faced were dismissed at sentencing."

He was sentenced to 14 years with an agreement he will serve 8 in prison.

The navy medic flipped and agreed to testify against the Marines. He said:

Awad's hands and feet were bound and he was dragged from his home and shot numerous times. Then, he said, one Marine put the dead man's fingerprints on a rifle and shovel to make it look like he had been caught trying to plant a roadside bomb.

Just one day after the House passed the non-binding Iraq war resolution, the Senate gathered on a Saturday and voted against it.

It was the second time this month that minority Republicans successfully filibustered a nonbinding resolution opposing the troop buildup.

Senators voted 56-34 to invoke cloture and proceed to a floor vote on the resolution, with seven Republicans joining all the chamber's Democrats in calling for an end to the debate. But the motion fell four votes short of the threshold needed under Senate rules.

Here are the Republicans who voted for the resolution:

On Hillary Clinton's website today, she unveils a new message on Iraq.

U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, the early front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, has called for a 90-day deadline to start pulling American troops from Iraq.

"Now it's time to say the redeployment should start in 90 days or the Congress will revoke authorization for this war," the New York senator said in a video on her campaign Web site, repeating a point included in a bill she introduced on Friday.

As to Hillary's bill, introduced yesterday:

Clinton's bill would cap the number of troops in Iraq at the January 1 level, prior to Bush's decision to add 21,500 to the approximately 130,000 soldiers already there.... [and] would require congressional authorization to exceed her proposed cap on U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

Hillary also has a clear message for President Bush:

"If George Bush doesn't end the war before he leaves office, when I'm president, I will," Clinton said in the video.

More...

Hang him:

"[It] is a singular omission in this message [by President James K. Polk], that it, no where intimates when the President expects the war to terminate. At it's beginning, Genl. Scott was, by this same President, driven into disfavor, if not disgrace, for intimating that peace could not be conquered in less than three or four months. But now, at the end of about twenty months, during which time our arms have given us the most splendid successes--every department, and every part, land and water, officers and privates, regulars and volunteers, doing all that men could do, and hundreds of things which it had ever before been thought men could not do,--after all this, this same President gives us a long message, without showing us, that, as to the end, he himself, has, even an imaginary conception. As I have before said, he knows not where he is. He is a bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed man. God grant he may be able to show, there is not something about his conscious [sic], more painful than all his mental perplexity!"

The Hillary camp says:

“If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from,” Mrs. Clinton told an audience in Dover, N.H., in a veiled reference to two rivals for the nomination, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina.

Personally, I don't care about an apology. What I want to know is why she thought a war with Iraq in 2002 made strategic sense, even if the intelligence was not wrong and stovepiped. Because, Senator Clinton, this is perhaps the most serious question we ask of our Presidential candidates- when do you think we should use military force? Your vote FOR the Iraq war in October 2002 was wrong on every level. It is a vote that must be explained. And yes, you voted for war Senator:

SEC. 3. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES.

(a) AUTHORIZATION. The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to

(1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq . . .

The question is why. It is a question you should answer.