Someone posted a comment in my earlier story today calling for a general strike claiming that the only way we can end the war in Iraq is to win it. But which war in Iraq can we win? Against which enemy? There are too many sides, and too many conflicts to know what victory would even look like.

Not when you have Sunni killing Sunni …

Sheikh Maawia Naji Jebara and five bodyguards have been killed in Salaheddin province when a roadside bomb exploded under their convoy near the central city of Samarra, a senior police officer said.

Jebara was a senior member of the Salaheddin Awakening Council, a coalition of tribes in the Tikrit district which formed to fight al-Qaeda. […]

… or elected officials being assassinated on a daily basis:

Elsewhere, Abbas al-Khafaji, the mayor of Iskandariyah, a mixed Shia-Sunni town 60km south of Baghdad, and four of his bodyguards were killed by a roadside bomb on their way to work, police said.

“An improvised explosive device planted at the side of the road exploded while the vehicle of Abbas al-Khafaji, mayor of the district, was passing by,” a police official said.

Not when Shi’a militias fight and kill each other for power and the right to control Iraq’s oil wealth …

Southern Iraq is also important to groups vying for power because the city of Basra directly borders Iran, the main ally for Iraqi Shia and their major source of political validation, and Najaf and Karbala, two of the holiest cities for Shia around the world are located in the south (the recent clashes in Karbala were about controlling these shrines). With the British vacating their positions in Basra, Shia groups, who had hitherto displayed a degree of unity in their fight against Sunnis, are now increasingly likely to lock horns; those who control the south seem set to emerge as the future power brokers of the country.

Although capable of inflicting widespread damage, [Muqtada] al-Sadr’s chances of becoming this power broker are slim. For one, his Shia rivals receive greater backing from Iran, which has displayed a largely Machiavellian attitude towards the situation in Iraq, choosing never to bid on the underdog. The advent of the Americans has also worsened the position of the Sadrists as they became largely excluded from all government institutions.

The new Iraqi hierarchy favored the followers of al-Hakim, who apparently represented a more dominant and perhaps more trustworthy (from an American point of view) branch of Shias.

… or when foreign ambassadors cannot drive the streets of the capital of Iraq without endangering their lives …

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — Three bombs Wednesday in Baghdad struck the convoy of the Polish ambassador to Iraq, wounding the diplomat and killing three others in the entourage, including one of his bodyguards, authorities said. […]

Iraqi officials said the strike targeted the convoy, but it was unclear if it was an assassination attempt on Pietrzyk.

But the deputy chief of mission was unequivocal, saying, “In my view it was a deliberate attack to kill.”

… or where mercenaries employed by the US government roam the streets shooting indiscriminately at anyone and everyone in their vicinity anytime they feel the need to do so:

(cont.)

Witnesses close to the places where most of the Iraqi civilians were killed directly facing the Blackwater convoy on the southern rim of the square all give a relatively consistent picture of how events began and unfolded.

The Blackwater convoy was in the square to control traffic for a second convoy that was approaching from the south. The second convoy was bringing diplomats who had been evacuated from a meeting after a bomb went off near the compound where the meeting was taking place. That convoy had not arrived at the square by the time the shooting started.

The events in the square began with a short burst of bullets that witnesses described as unprovoked. A traffic policeman standing at the edge of the square, Sarhan Thiab, saw that a young man in a car had been hit. In the line of traffic, that car was the third vehicle from the intersection where the convoy had positioned itself.

“We tried to help him,” Mr. Thiab said. “I saw the left side of his head was destroyed and his mother was crying out: ‘My son, my son. Help me, help me.’”

Another traffic policeman rushed to the driver’s side to try to get her son out of the car, but the car was still rolling forward because her son had lost control, according to a taxi driver close by who gave his name as Abu Mariam (“father of Mariam”).

Then Blackwater guards opened fire with a barrage of bullets, according to the police and numerous witnesses. Mr. Ahmed’s father later counted 40 bullet holes in the car. His mother, Mohassin Kadhim, appears to have been shot to death as she cradled her son in her arms. Moments later the car caught fire after the Blackwater guards fired a type of grenade into the vehicle.

The taxi driver was a few feet ahead of Mrs. Kadhim’s car when he heard the first gunshots. He was aware of cars behind him trying to back out of the street or turn around and drive away from the square. He tried frantically to turn his car, but ran into the curb.

Unable to escape, he pulled himself over to the passenger side, which was the one not facing the square, opened the door and crawled out, flattening his body to the ground.

“The dust from the street was coming in my mouth and as I pulled myself out of the area, my left leg was shot by a bullet,” he said. […]

By then cars were struggling to get out of the line of fire, and many people were abandoning their vehicles altogether. The scene turned hellish.

“The shooting started like rain; everyone escaped his car,” said Fareed Walid Hassan, a truck driver who hauls goods in his Hyundai minibus.

In a country where it is estimated over a million Iraqis have died from violence since we invaded and as many as 4 million have fled their homes to live as refugees, where cholera outbreaks are an ever constant concern because the water supplies are so contaminated, and when even the heavily fortified Green Zone (where American diplomats and Iraq’s government officials work in relative security) is subject to frequent mortar and missile attacks, what would victory look like, and how would it be accomplished? More deaths? More rubble? More Mission Accomplished banners on aircraft carriers?

I’d really like to know, wouldn’t you?