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This is what John McCain wants to perpetuate for another 100 years, and Dick "Darth Vadar" Cheney calls "phenomenal progress."

As oblivious to the world around him as ever, and despite needing a complicated security routine and lots of bodyguards just to move around the Green Zone, Cheney cited "phenomenal" security progress in Iraq yesterday just as a nearby bombing killed 40 people. The heavily fortified Green Zone actually took targeted incoming mortar fire during Cheney's visit there, which occurred a few hours after John McCain helicoptered in and made a similar pronouncement before flying away to safety.

If the Vice President of the United States can't visit the most fortified place in the world, the capital of the country he occupies militarily, without dodging mortar strikes, then "phenomenal progress" are not words any rational person would use to describe the situation. Gen. MacArthur in Tokyo never suffered any similar humiliation; except during the Tet offensive, people moved around Saigon freely during the Vietnam war without risk of being blown up.

Yet even as Cheney was speaking in Baghdad, Mideast authority Juan Cole of the University of Michigan pointed out that a massive car bomb in the Shiite holy city of Karbala killed 52 and wounded another 75, according to AFP. Shiite feelings turned raw over the attack, according to Iraqi newspapers, and are threatening further civil war violence.

As horrid as the Karbala bombing was, it only scratched the surface of the on-going daily violence around Iraq yesterday. McClatchy reports 11 additional incidents in Baghdad alone, with 16 people killed and 17 wounded; in Kirkuk, Salahuddin and Basra, McClatchy reports another five people were killed in separate incidents. Basra is in the midst of a battle between warring factions of the Madhi army and the Sadr corps that resembles the violent mob wars on Chicago streets during Prohibition. Elliot Ness couldn't control the fighting in Chicago and the US military will never end the violence in Iraq until it leaves.

Meanwhile, as all of this was going on in Iraq, the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva issued a new report on the rapidly deteriorating humanitarian crisis in Iraq:

"Five years after the outbreak of the war in Iraq, the humanitarian situation in most of the country remains among the most critical in the world. Because of the conflict, millions of Iraqis have insufficient access to clean water, sanitation and health care. The current crisis

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