I was up with the United States Senate last night. This was purely coincidental. Although prone to no small degree of interrupted sleep, I am not one to watch the Senate, day or night. If I want idiocy I will watch MTV – at least My Sweet 16 has some concept of reality.

Both the Senate and myself were up fretting into the wee hours of a Tuesday night. Both of us were worrying about a toothache. Mine is due to an old botched root canal. The Senate’s is due to Iraq.

Five years ago I had a root canal. My dentist at that time originally wanted only to cap a fractured tooth. In the process of capping it, the fracture deepened, and the tooth split without the dentist knowing it. I got a really bad infection and had to have a second operation, this time, the dreaded root canal. Now it appears that the bone is, five years later, infected again and I will either need to have another root canal (at considerable expense I might add) or I might lose the tooth.

Four years ago we went into Baghdad with confidence. Like my former dentist, it was a simple matter to put a cap on a cracked tooth, and go out for a game of tennis. If we took out the upper layer of Baathist support for the existing regime, we could pacify Iraq with a modest security force while the Iraqis formed their own government and began the process of rapid democratization. The US Army and Coalition Provisional Authority would be able to cap the tooth preventing it from becoming infected.

However, like my tooth, the US made the fracture deeper and created an infection in Iraqi society that fed the insurgency. If you don’t buy this argument, then I suggest you have a close look at what happened after Paul Bremer began his program of rapid de-Baathification and dismissed the existing army – an army I might add – that wanted to stay intact to build the new Iraq. The insurgency was created and spread to neighborhoods that once supported the US invasion. Like white blood cells, the US Army initially fought the infection with a scorched earth policy, losing support from Shia and Sunni alike, and spreading the infection.

A root canal was necessary in the form of a military surge beginning this year. Now, after some small successes, it appears that the infection is too overwhelming and we either need to continue to reinforce failure with yet another troop increase, or pull out the infected tooth.

Nobody wants that to happen but extraction may be unavoidable.