Opinion (Ed Harriman): US troops will stay in Iraq, and the war will get worse

The war in Iraq is intensifying. More American combat troops are arriving. They are in more battles with insurgents. And from Washington there is a crescendo of briefings accusing the Iranians of flooding Iraq with money and weapons and even of arming Sunni insurgents. We shouldn't be surprised - this is what George Bush and his war planners intended. Even the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group, in its report before Christmas, said it could support a short-term "surge" to try and regain control of Baghdad.

The bottom line is that the president, the study group and most Washington policy-makers want to get as many US combat troops as they can out of Iraq by the US presidential elections in 2008. But that doesn't mean pulling out.

Read the rest at the Guardian