The killings continue to mount in Iraq.

In Saturday's deadliest attack, a suicide car bomber blew up his vehicle near a crowded condolence tent during a funeral for a Shi'ite tribal sheikh in a small town north of Baghdad.

Police Colonel Muthaffar Aboud said 35 people were killed and around 50 wounded in the attack in Abu Sayda, near Baquba, a violent city about 65 km (40 miles) northeast of Baghdad. The wounded were taken to at least two hospitals in Baquba.

Iraqis traditionally set up tents to receive well-wishers at funerals. The fact the funeral was for a well-known local leader suggests the tent would have been packed with mourners.

Earlier, another suicide car bomber targeted a busy market in the Diyala Bridge area just to the south of Baghdad, killing 13 people and wounding around 20, the Interior Ministry said.

And yet President Bush clings blindly to his plan of having no plan for withdrawal.

"We will fight the terrorists in Iraq, we will stay in the fight until we have achieved the victory that our brave troops have fought for," said a leather jacket-clad Bush.

What this victory might be, aside from more pollyanna-visions of Iraqis in the streets singing kum-bah-yah, Bush has refused to say.

The thing is, these are not just terrorists, they are Iraqis. And they are Iraqis killing Iraqis.

U.S. and Iraqi forces have been conducting operations against Sunni Arab insurgents throughout western Iraq in recent weeks in an effort to stem the insurgency ahead of the election and increase the ability of Sunnis to make it to the polls.

At the last election in January, most Sunni Arabs either boycotted or were too scared by insurgent threats to vote, so the minority community, once influential under Saddam, ended up with next to no representation in parliament.

And it seems that Bush Administration and Pentagon claims that the Iraqi insurgency is dominated by foreign al-Qaeda elements have been false -- more falsities to toss on the formidable pile Bush, Cheney and company are compiling.

"They come across the border and use Tall Afar as a base to launch attacks across northern Iraq," Col. H.R. McMaster, commander of the Army's 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, which led the assault, said in a briefing the day before it began.

When the air and ground operation wound down in mid-September, nearly 200 insurgents had been killed and close to 1,000 detained, the military said at the time. But interrogations and other analyses carried out in recent weeks showed that none of those captured was from outside Iraq. According to McMaster's staff, the 3rd Armored Cavalry last detained a foreign fighter in June.

That's right, not one foreigner.

The relative importance of the foreign component of Iraq's two-year-old insurgency, estimated at between 4 and 10 percent of all guerrillas, has been a matter of growing debate in military and intelligence circles, U.S. and Iraqi officials and American commanders said. Top U.S. military officials here have long emphasized the influence of groups such as al Qaeda in Iraq, an insurgent network led by a Jordanian, Abu Musab Zarqawi. But analysts say the focus on foreign elements is also an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of the insurgency in the eyes of Iraqis, by portraying it as terrorism foisted on the country by outsiders.

"Both Iraqis and coalition people often exaggerate the role of foreign infiltrators and downplay the role of Iraqi resentment in the insurgency," said Anthony H. Cordesman, a former Pentagon official now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, who is writing a book about the Iraqi insurgency.

"It makes the government's counterinsurgency efforts seem more legitimate, and it links what's going on in Iraq to the war on terrorism," he continued. "When people go out into battle, they often characterize enemies in the most negative way possible. Obviously there are all kinds of interacting political prejudices they can bring out by blaming outsiders."

Yes, because we don't want Americans especially to know that we're not defending Iraq, we're participating in a civil war within Iraq. We are fighting Iraqis over what ostensibly is their own country.

U.S. and Iraqi officials have long maintained that a key to stabilizing the country is preventing an alliance between foreign fighters and Iraqis who might be amenable to pursuing politics instead of violence to accomplish their goals. But as the country's nascent political process has moved forward -- a transitional government has been elected and a constitutional referendum held so far this year, and parliamentary elections are scheduled for next month -- there is little evidence that the native insurgency has diminished.

In much of the country, including the north and center, commanders say, the insurgency is led and populated almost entirely by Iraqis, many of them former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, who do not work closely with Zarqawi's group. Commanders there say Iraqi insurgents are largely responsible for the roadside bombings, some involving armor-penetrating weapons, that have been responsible for roughly half of the U.S. combat deaths in recent months.

"The foreign fighters' attacks tend to be more spectacular, but local nationals, the Saddamists, the Iraqi rejectionists, are much more problematic," said Maj. Gen. Joseph J. Taluto, commander of the Army's 42nd Infantry Division. His unit, which lost 59 soldiers during its tour here, was based in the northern city of Tikrit, Hussein's home town, before transferring the region to the 101st Airborne Division this month.

Al Qaeda in Iraq maintains a presence in the region, he said, "but they're not having much of an impact. Their message is not resonating."

In Washington, a senior State Department official called foreign fighters "an important element to the insurgency," but added that "it would be a mistake to imagine that this isn't a largely Iraqi-based operation with critical support from foreign elements."

Is it our job, is it our business, to fight in another nation's civil war, even if we unleashed the combatants?

"Iraq is making amazing progress from the days of being under the thumb of a brutal dictator," [Bush] said.

That view contrasts sharply with the feelings of many Iraqis who are frustrated by the lack of progress since Saddam's overthrow, including high unemployment, scant rebuilding, soaring corruption and a widespread lack of security.

Saddam is out of power. He had no weapons of mass destruction. The Iraqis have their country back.

And yet our soldiers are dying every day. Why? To pick sides in a civil war?

At the very least, we need to have an honest and serious debate here. And the cheap rhetoric from the Republican White House, and the arrogant imperial proclamations by the Republican Vice President, and the outrageous and ridiculous attacks by chickenhawk Republican Congressional Representatives at war critics, and cynical bullshit resolutions by Republicans in the House, are not only counterproductive -- they are borderline treasonous.

Our fighting men and women deserve better. --Not that Cheney and his draft-dodging ilk would know the difference.

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