The Memory Lingers On

The syntactical artist Donald Rumsfeld may be long gone from his role at the Pentagon, but his legacy is still with us in so many ways. The big ways, well, they are too infuriating to list, but thanks to the Washington Post we have a prime example of the little ways in which the song is over, but the Rumsfeld lingers on:

Competition for power and resources in the oil-rich south has been ongoing for months among the Mahdi Army of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr; the Badr Corps militia of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, the largest single party in the Iraqi parliament; and the breakaway Sadrist movement known as Fadhila. The Shiite groups are opposed and allied with each other in a tangle of national and local issues, with many divisions reflected in factions of the Shiite-dominated Iraqi security forces.

Although the Bush administration has tried to monitor the growing conflict in Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, "our intelligence in that area is far less than we would like. We don't have any forces there," the senior official said, adding that "we are operating with a good dose of opaqueness." (emphasis mine)

Operating with a good dose of opaqueness? So, then, we're following with our standard Iraq procedure, eh?