Iraq: The Unraveling Continues Apace

Iraq seems to slip a little more from our collective consciousness with every passing day.

December was the first month since the March 2003 invasion when there was not a single U.S. combat death. The Kiko's House Iraq blogroll is a third of what it was two years ago because . . . well, there just doesn't seem to be the interest on the part of many Iraqis, let alone Americans. So everything seems to be okey-dokey, right?

Not right.

Thomas Ricks, the nonpareil military blogger, has been documenting the steady unraveling of Iraq at The Best Defense. In the latest installment, he quotes a knowledgeable friend who has decades of experience in intelligence who predicts that Iraq eventually will cease to exist, perhaps in as few as five years.

The big pieces of the country that the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld axis saved from itself will be gobbled up by Syria, Iran and perhaps Turkey, the friend predicts, with an independent Kurdistan in the middle.

So you see, it was worth that trillion bucks and 4,300 American deaths.