The continuing Iraq war.(THE LAST WORD)

Even after deploying 25,000 more troops as part of President Bush's "surge," the news out of Iraq doesn't get any better. Staff Sergeant David Safstrom, on his third tour of duty in the area, recently searched the body of a man killed by his unit in the process of setting a roadside bomb. He discovered that the man was a sergeant in the Iraqi Army. Similarly, Captain Douglas Rogers noted that the Iraqis he and his men had trained were firing at them in a recent battle. And Sergeant Kevin O'Flarity told a reporter, "'Hall of the Iraqi security forces are insurgents."

When Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Frank met with Iraqi police officials in late May, police Captain Adel Fakry complained that some American soldiers had expressed "distrust" of his personnel. Colonel Frank explained: "The reason there is distrust is because I have a video of six Iraqi officers placing a bomb against my soldiers, and they came from your station." Add to this the grim statistic showing that April and May 2007 produced the highest two-month total of U.S. fatalities during the entire four-year struggle.

President Bush told the nation his purpose in increasing troop levels was to stabilize the situation so that the Iraqi government would have time to persuade the competing Islamic sects to cease shooting at each other. But, so far, no progress has been made toward ending the escalating civil war that sees our forces being targeted by both sides. And even Mr. Bush has predicted that this summer will be rough with many American casualties.

Yet, despite the continual claims that the troops will be withdrawn as soon as their mission has been completed, a gargantuan embassy complex the United States is now building in Baghdad makes it painfully obvious that our government intends to keep an American presence deeply mired in Iraq for a long time, and that there must be more to our intervention in Iraq than our government has shared with the American people.

The new U.S. embassy, scheduled to open in September, has been aptly described by the Associated Press's Anne Gearan as a "city-within-a-city." Gearan noted that it will be "the world's largest and most expensive foreign mission," occupying 104 acres, containing 21 buildings, providing desk space for a thousand bureaucrats, hiding behind high, blast-proof walls intended to protect the occupants from the chaos outside--all for an estimated cost of $592 million.

State Department official David Satterfield ...