I'm posting this entire link by daily KOS. I might give you an idea of what we have to look forward to.

US General: Iraqi guerillas deadlier

To all the chickenhawks and their apologists who think things in Iraq are getting better, the top US general in that country begs to differ.

The top American general in Iraq said Thursday guerrillas fighting his troops were becoming deadlier, after the killing of three more soldiers added urgency to U.S. efforts to garner help stabilizing the country [...]

"The enemy has evolved. It is a little bit more lethal, little bit more complex, little bit more sophisticated and in some cases a little bit more tenacious," said Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of ground forces in Iraq.

"As long as we are here the coalition need to be prepared to take casualties," he told a news conference. "We should not be surprised if one of these days we wake up to find there's been a major firefight or a major terrorist attack.

In Vietnam, we suffered 1,864 killed between 1961 and 1965, an average of 373 per year (someone I'm sure can find more precise numbers).

In the eight months since Bush launched his war, we have suffered 316 dead, plus an additional 54 allied deaths.

And that paints just part of the picture. In the first five years of the Vietnam War, we suffered 7,337 wounded in action, or an average of 1,467 per year. In Iraq, we have suffered at least 1,695 wounded -- meaning we are running higher than casualty rates of those early years of the Vietnam War.

Bush has gotten us into a mess he can't fix, and real people are suffering the consequences. And no matter how rosy a picture they may try to paint, fact is, we've got a clusterfuck on our hands.
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Oil, War And A Growing Sense Of Panic In The US
Don't tell me that America would have invaded Iraq if its chief export was beetroot
by Robert Fisk

Oil is slippery stuff but not as slippery as the figures now being peddled by Iraq's American occupiers. Up around Kirkuk, the authorities are keeping the sabotage figures secret - because they can't stop their pipelines to Turkey blowing up. And down in Baghdad, where the men who produce Iraq's oil production figures are beginning to look like the occupants of Plato's cave - drawing conclusions from shadows on their wall - the statistics are being cooked. Paul Bremer, the US proconsul who wears combat boots, is "sexing up" the figures to a point where even the oilmen are shaking their heads.

Take Kirkuk. Only when the television cameras capture a blown pipe, flames billowing, do the occupation powers report sabotage. This they did, for example, on 18 August. But the same Turkish pipeline has been hit before and since. It was blown on 17 September and four times the following day. US patrols and helicopters move along the pipeline but, in the huge ravines and tribal areas through which it passes, long sections are indefensible.

European oilmen in Baghdad realise now that Iraqi officials in the oil ministry - one of only two government institutions that the Americans defended from the looters - knew very well that the sabotage was going to occur. "They told me in June that there would be no oil exports from the north," one of them said to me this week. "They knew it was going to be sabotaged - and it had obviously been planned long before the invasion in March."
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All exits from Iraq are blocked

THE SITUATION in Iraq continues to worsen. Already six months into the occupation, the security situation is so grave that the United Nations secretary general is withdrawing UN staff whose presence there is vital for humanitarian work. In addition to the armed robbers who have been roaming the streets of Iraqi cities, terrorising people since the collapse of the old regime, the resistance is acting indiscriminately, targeting, besides the occupying forces, foreign missions, UN installations, Iraqi police, worshipping places, political figures and members of the Governing Council. With every added day to the already delayed and indeed incapable handling of the growing security problem, the outlaws grow stronger and harder to remove.

There are no visible prospects of any change soon. The two main occupiers, the US and the UK, seem to have stretched their military means to the very limit, and their ongoing efforts at the UN to bolster the occupation by involving other nations' men and money seem to be discouraged by the large scale of the risk involved and by the reluctance to join the occupiers, rather than, as a UN force, replace them.
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Cousins and Veils...
by Riverbend