In This Issue

I WAS IN Los Angeles last weekend, where friends kept asking me the question that my friends up here are all tired of hearing me talk about: can George W. Bush really be defeated? And my answer was, and is, sure – if John Kerry can get his act together and start making strong points on the two areas in which Bush is deeply vulnerable: the economy (stupid!) and Iraq.

It's been almost a year since Bush had his multimillion-dollar photo op aboard an aircraft carrier announcing the end to active hostilities in Iraq. And yet the past two weeks have been among the most bloody since the invasion began – and all indications are that things will only get worse.

As Jason Vest reports on page 16, even hawks in the Bush administration agree the situation on the ground in Baghdad is a mess. In fact, an internal memo he's obtained, written by a U.S. official who had been working with the Coalition Provisional Authority, says Iraq could be headed for civil war.

Vest is an experienced journalist who's been writing about national security issues for years and works for the American Prospect. His story was commissioned by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies for the exclusive use of AAN members. It's the sort of project people in the alternative press have been talking about for years: if a significant number of the 122 members of AAN can get together and publish big national stories like this one, the combined readership will far exceed any of the big dailies.

In this case, the story has particular credibility because the memo comes not from a longtime critic of the Bush administration but from an insider, someone who strongly supported the invasion. What he says, Vest reports, reflects a growing concern even among established military analysts that the Pentagon has utterly bungled the occupation and that it's hard to see much of anything good coming of continued U.S. presence in Iraq.

On the other hand, as we point out in an editorial on page 11, it's hard to see how the United States can simply cut and run at this point: that would send the nation into chaos.

So Bush (acting, according to Bob Woodward's new book, Plan of Attack, without the support of advisers like Secretary of State Colin Powell) has created a mess he can't clean up. And it's hard to hide.