No, really, the US has lost control

Gee, and I thought I was a pessimist:

BAGHDAD -- While American commanders have suggested that civil war is possible in Iraq, many leaders, experts and ordinary people in Baghdad and around the Middle East say it is already underway, and that the real worry ahead is that the conflict will destroy the flimsy Iraqi state and draw in surrounding countries....

"We're not talking about just a full-scale civil war. This would be a failed-state situation with fighting among various groups," growing into regional conflict, Joost Hiltermann, Middle East project director for the International Crisis Group, said by telephone from Amman, Jordan.

"The war will be over Iraq, over its dead body," Hiltermann said.

"All indications point to a current state of civil war and the disintegration of the Iraqi state," Nawaf Obaid, an adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and an adviser to the Saudi government, said last week at a conference in Washington on U.S.-Arab relations.

Gee, if only someone had predicted this would be a gigantic disaster that would set back American foreign policy for a decade or more. Oh wait, some of us did. But of course, we're dirty hippies who don't contribute anything to society - aside from being right on crucial matters of foreign policy - and so we can safely be ignored. Safely. Ignored.