Team Bush sticking to its game plan

By MAUREEN DOWD
SYNDICATED COLUMNIST

WASHINGTON -- Yep, we've got 'em right where we want 'em.

We've brought the fight to their turf, they're swarming into Iraq and blowing up our troops and other Westerners every day, and that's just where we want to be.

Our exhausted and frustrated soldiers are in a hideously difficult environment they're not familiar with, dealing with a culture America only dimly understands, where our desperation for any intelligence has reduced us to recruiting Saddam's old spies, whom we didn't trust in the first place, and where we are so strapped that soldiers may have to start serving back-to-back, year-long overseas tours.

We don't know exactly which of our ghostly Arab enemies are which, how many there are, who's plotting with whom, what weapons they have, how they're getting into Iraq, where they're hiding, or who's financing and organizing them.

And we certainly don't understand the violent internecine religious battles we've set in motion: At first the Shiites were with us, and the Sunnis in the center of the country were giving us all the trouble. Now a new generation of radical Shiites is rising up and assassinating other Shiites aligned with us. They view us as the enemy and our quest as a chance to establish an Islamist state, which Rummy says won't be tolerated.

In Tuesday's macabre milestone, the number of U.S. soldiers who have died since the war now exceeds the number who died during the war.

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