Tom Engelhardt has a great piece up on his site TomDisptach in which he examines what “the present American offensive in Baghdad’s vast Shiite slum, Sadr City, tells us about America’s no-exit future wars.” Engelhardt, author of The End of Victory Culture, begins his essay,
The Last War and the Next One : Descending into Madness in Iraq — and Beyond with a rather simple fact and follows it with the all too sad facts:

The last war won’t end, but in the Pentagon they’re already arguing about the next one.

Let’s start with that “last war” and see if we can get things straight. Just over five years ago, American troops entered Baghdad in battle mode, felling the Sunni-dominated government of dictator Saddam Hussein and declaring Iraq “liberated.” In the wake of the city’s fall, after widespread looting, the new American administrators dismantled the remains of Saddam’s government in its hollowed out, trashed ministries; disassembled the Sunni-dominated Baathist Party which had ruled Iraq since the 1960s, sending its members home with news that there was no coming back; dismantled Saddam’s 400,000 man army; and began to denationalize the economy. Soon, an insurgency of outraged Sunnis was raging against the American occupation.

After initially resisting democratic elections, American occupation administrators finally gave in to the will of the leading Shiite clergyman, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, and agreed to sponsor them. In January 2005, these brought religious parties representing a long-oppressed Shiite majority to power, parties which had largely been in exile in neighboring Shiite Iran for years.

Now, skip a few years, and U.S. troops have once again entered Baghdad in battle mode. [TomDispatch]

I thoroughly recommend reading the entire piece. After seeing Standard Operating Procedure the realities of what war means today is quite frightening.

On that note, be sure to visit the action campaign site for the film : http://takepart.com/sop and to learn how you can do your part to stop torture.