How do you beat this?

The NY Times has a must-read article on its front page today about the situations in Fallujah and Ramadi.

Both of the cities, Falluja and Ramadi, and much of Anbar Province, are now controlled by fundamentalist militias, with American troops confined mainly to heavily protected forts on the desert's edge. ...
In the past three weeks, three former Hussein loyalists appointed to important posts in Falluja and Ramadi have been eliminated by the militants and their Baathist allies. The chief of a battalion of the American-trained Iraqi National Guard in Falluja was beheaded by the militants, prompting the disintegration of guard forces in the city. The Anbar governor was forced to resign after his three sons were kidnapped. The third official, the provincial police chief in Ramadi, was lured to his arrest by American marines after three assassination attempts led him to secretly defect to the rebel cause.

The national guard commander and the governor were both forced into humiliating confessions, denouncing themselves as "traitors" on videotapes that sell in the Falluja marketplace for 50 cents. The tapes show masked men ending the guard commander's halting monologue, toppling him to the ground, and sawing off his head, to the accompaniment of recorded Koranic chants ordaining death for those who "make war upon Allah." The governor is shown with a photograph of himself with an American officer, sobbing as he repents working with the "infidel Americans," then being rewarded with a weeping reunion with his sons.

In another taped sequence available in the Falluja market, a mustached man identifying himself as an Egyptian is shown kneeling in a flowered shirt, confessing that he "worked as a spy for the Americans," planting electronic "chips" used for setting targets in American bombing raids. The man says he was paid $150 for each chip laid, then he, too, is tackled to the ground by masked guards while a third masked man, a burly figure who proclaims himself a dispenser of Islamic justice, pulls a 12-inch knife from a scabbard, grabs the Egyptian by the scalp, and severs his head.

Though every fiber of my being demands that we should stop these people from establishing a new tyranny in the state of Iraq... I don't see how we could. At least, not without regressing towards a method of military occupation that our nation has long since abandoned.

We're not fighting an army here. We're fighting an organization that has become enmeshed with the very society of the places its taken control over. I don't see how you can "root that out" without a great deal of savagery.

And at this stage, we're fighting and dying for what, exactly? Allawi's regime?

Oh, right... "democracy." Just not the fully representative kind...

After five hours of wrangling over who would get the 81 available seats in the assembly, delegates today seemed to agree on a list. The 81 were predominantly from large political parties, including those affiliated with Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's governing party, religious Shiite and Sunni groups, as well as Kurds.

But a large number of delegates — mostly from the small independent parties — said they had been shut out of the process and withdrew their candidacies in protest.

"Today the interim national congress has been formed," said Fuad Masum, the head of the national conference. "The process was legal."

Delegates poured out of the large auditorium at about 9 p.m. Some spoke angrily about the voting process, which they said had been manipulated by larger, more powerful parties. Others were jubiliant and hundreds lined up on the first floor of the convention to receive per diem financial allotments from the conference organizers.

This war's a disaster. I was opposed to it from the beginning as it seemed a foolish waste of America's strength in a critical time, pursuing phantom menaces. But once we took Baghdad, I supported it on two simple grounds. Morally, America shouldn't destroy countries without also repairing the damage created in its wake. Strategically, one of the worst things you can do for American national security is lose a war. Before the Bush Administration, America enjoyed the most fearsome military machine in the world. Unfortunately, every regime in the world now knows the effective limitations of that power, and I see no reason why our enemies (or the enemies of those we would protect) will not now provoke us in ways that anticipate those limits.

It seems to me that the most just (though diplomatically difficult) response to the present situation is to carve Iraq into separate states... at the very least untethering the still democratic and secularist Kurds from the monster we're creating in the south... and to focus our military's actions on guaranteeing the territorial integrity of Kurdistan.