Yes, the US is losing the war

I've been saying since June, I think, that the US is losing the war in Iraq and will not admit it.
Gilliard summarizes the American problems in Meanwhile, back in Najaf: "The question is why the US Army cannot force a battle to the conclusion against lightly armed, barely trained guerrillas. The better part of a combined brigade of US heavy armor and Marines could not defeat an insurgency of pissed off ghetto teenagers. Think a pissed off group of bloods and crips with high explosives and religious support. The US could not close and kill with them, even before they got to the Imam Ali shrine. Now, they're back to Sadr City, bloodied but unbowed."
On CNN last Thursday, former UN ambassador Richard Holdbrook said this:
". . . the United States' position in Iraq is getting progressively more difficult to sustain. Fallujah has now become a liberated zone, only 35 miles from Baghdad in which all sorts of the worst people in the world, terrorists, al Qaeda types, other people hostile to U.S. are pouring in. Najaf is now happened the same thing. The United States is in a disastrous situation in Iraq right now . . . I think that Americans really ought to hear from President Bush as to what our policy is in Iraq. He hasn't explained in a long time what's going on. He tells the American public things like, well, we've turned the corner in Iraq or we're bringing democracy to Iraq or he praises Iraq's performance in the Athens Olympics, but he doesn't explain what our policy is, whether there's any exit strategy and our troops have turned into the military wing of the Allawi government and that's a very odd position to be in. . . Any way you cut this, Miles, Najaf is a setback for the United States politically. . . . What is the United States doing, acting as the military force for Allawi, a secular Shiite, in his brutal internal civil war against Muqtada al Sadr, a monstrous and brutal extreme Shiite? . . . Ayatollah Sistani helped us out of a jam today, but anyone who thinks he is our friend has got a lot of learning to do about Islam, Iraq and Shiism."