A compilation of recent news you may or may not have seen regarding America's most disastrous war

Rats. Ship. Sinking: In the last two weeks four prominent Republican congressmen have bailed on Bush's folly, repudiating the increasingly permanent-looking "surge" and calling on the President to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq. Ranking Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN), Sen. Pete Dominici (R-NM), Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH), and Rep. John Doolittle (R-Abramoff) are the tip of a growing iceberg that represents the best legislative hope of ending the war: enough Republicans defying the White House that any Bush veto can be overridden.

Meantime, Democratic congressional leaders Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are pledging several more battles and votes on Iraq in July, centering on the 2008 defense appropriations bill, a free-standing House bill calling for troop withdrawal, and a measure revoking the Oct. 2002 Congressional resolution that enabled Bush to order the invasion of Iraq. (Note that Congress did the same thing once before, revoking the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1970, and it accomplished nothing: it still took four more years to get America out of Vietnam.)

Oh, and the House has passed a bill reconstituting the Iraq Study Group, on the implausible theory that maybe Dubya will listen now. And a Congressional investigation has revealed that $19 billion in training money later, the Pentagon cannot say how many of 346,500 presumably trained Iraq troops are operational. And, of course, of those 346,500 Iraqis, how many are now with us and how many are against us.

The Iraq government, poised for a two-month break and under heavy pressure to sign away all of Iraq's oil to US-based big oil companies (aka "benchmark"), has so far resisted that pressure. To be more accurate, the main Arab Sunni parties have blocked the measure, believing (as do most Iraqis) that it's a not- even-thinly-veiled attempt by the US to steal Iraq's oil. The measure has, however, passed through the Iraqi Cabinet after the Sunnis boycotted the Cabinet to protest the Shiite-dominated government's treatment of Sunnis.

While US corporate media has generally been parroting White House claims that the "surge" is working, the story on the ground is a little more grim. Only about one-third of Baghdad is under control despite the dramatic increase in US troop presence since January. In June, while the overall civilian death toll was down due to a decrease in large-scale car- and truck-bomb atrocities, according to a Health Ministry source 453 unidentified bodies were found in Baghdad in June, many bearing signs of torture. That number is up 41 percent from January, a discouraging sign since quelling the death squad activity that has fueled sectarian violence was the stated reason for Bush's escalation.

US troop deaths were also up sharply in June with the increased presence, and that presence has also led to more anti- Americanism stemming from incidents like the one on June 30, when US GIs "firing wildly" (according to witnesses) in the massive, Shiite militia-controlled Baghdad slum of Sadr City killed 26 Iraqis. The US military said all were "terrorists," but according to the Iraqi government all were civilians. The Army has also charged two soldiers with three counts each of premeditated murder of Iraqi civilians and then planting weapons on their dead bodies, in an incident near Iskandariyah, 30 miles south of Baghdad.

Protesting such incidents and the repeat bombing last month of the sacred Ankari-ya mosque in Samarra, thousands of followers of Shiite cleric and militia leader Moktada al-Sadr staged a week-long protest march from Baghdad to Samarra last week, demanding, among other things, the immediate withdrawal of all US troops.

A Human Rights Watch report last week blasted Kurdish militias in northern Iraq for routinely torturing prisoners. The militias are the closest allies in Iraq to the US military, meaning the US is almost certainly complicit in the torture, but the report received almost no US press coverage. Meantime, stellar New Yorker investigative reporter Seymour Hersh has struck again: in an interview with Gen. Antonio Taguba, the general in charge of Abu Ghraib investigation, Taguba charged that then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his advisors knew of Abu Ghraib torture months before the matter went public--meaning Rumsfeld et al. lied to Congress under oath that he had no advance knowledge of Abu Ghraib.

Tidbits: In yet another escalation of the Bush administration's efforts to paint Iran as the center of all evil in the universe (and therefore worthy of the next war), the US military accused Iran last week of participating in an attack in Iraq in January that killed five US soldiers... Secretary of Defense Robert Gates says he "does not anticipate" extending troop deployments beyond the now-extended 15 months as a solution to ongoing troop shortages ... a CNN poll in late June showed only 30 percent support for the war in Iraq, the lowest figure yet, and 38 percent of Republicans now opposed to the war, the highest figure yet. Meantime, in a Newsweek poll that almost makes one pine for Maoist reeducation camps, 41 percent of Americans still believe that Saddam was somehow involved in 9-11. That's down from nearly two- thirds of Americans in early 2003, but still...

Finally, the US and Russia have agreed to dismantle the UN agency that searched Iraq for weapons of mass destruction, and to affirm that Iraq had no such arms at the time of the US invasion in March 2003. Reportedly the fourth branch of the US government, the Office of the Vice President, issued a signing statement clarifying that Saddam could still come back from the grave and nuke Wichita at any moment.