Descent into chaos.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Meanwhile, in the other war - the one pushed off the front pages by the fierce fighting between Israel and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon - at least 100 civilians are being slaughtered every day.

The violence in Baghdad has become so horrific it's an understatement to say "all hell has broken loose." President Bush has ordered more troops to reinforce Baghdad, forcing military commanders to extend the tours of 3,500 war-weary soldiers. The prospect of a U.S. troop reduction in time to boost Republican chances in November's midterm elections grows more remote.

Bush had no choice but to bolster U.S. troop strength in Baghdad. As sectarian violence plunged Iraq into an orgy of religious revenge killing, the ineffectual government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki teetered on the brink of collapse.

Remember al-Maliki's pledge six weeks ago to crack down on the violence in Baghdad? `Operation Together Forward,' a joint Iraqi-U.S. military operation to restore security to the capital city, is a blood-soaked failure.

In his new book "Fiasco," Thomas Ricks, senior Pentagon correspondent for The Washington Post, argues that the invasion of Iraq was based on perhaps the worst war plan in American history.

With too few troops and no coherent post-war strategy, Ricks says "the U.S. effort resembled a banana republic coup d'etat more than a full-scale war plan that reflected the ambition of a great power to alter the politics of a crucial region of the world.'

Bush's effort to reinforce Baghdad could be a recipe for more of the same: an easy-to-predict failure using too few troops to secure too large an area with too many armed combatants. It's the formula Bush and his inept advisers have used to arrive at where they are in Iraq today, almost three and a half years since the disastrous decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

Raising U.S. troop levels from 9,000 to about 13,000 in Baghdad seems underwhelming given that there are already 50,000 of Iraq's best forces in the city of 11 million, and they have been utterly incapable of stopping the sectarian slaughter. The Shiite militias such as the Al Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade have grown stronger, as has their incentive to resist American control.

With no security to speak of outside the heavily fortified Green Zone, Baghdad's neighborhoods are Balkanizing along sectarian lines. Sectarian cleansing has forced tens of thousands to flee their Baghdad homes in mixed neighborhoods to seek shelter in protected enclaves.

The comparison to Beirut during Lebanon's civil war is unavoidable.

Halfway through a year that the Bush administration pledged would be "a period of significant transition for Iraq," the country is in ruins and Baghdad is the most dangerous city in the world.

Though U.S. officials refuse to admit that the sectarian carnage constitutes a civil war, such semantic distinctions no longer seem important.

Fortunately for the Bush administration, the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah has temporarily turned Americans' attention away from the disintegration of Iraq. But Bush won't be able to stall a cease-fire in Lebanon for much longer, and the question remains: How and when will the United States accomplish its mission in Iraq? And, once again, what was the mission?