Iraq government condemns a raid which discovers tortured prisoners.

Having been completely put in my place by global policy mandarin, Laura Bush, I was about to skip over this report because it's simply that one bombing per day that shouldn't be discouraging me.

A suicide car bomber shattered a relative lull in Baghdad's violence Monday, killing at least 28 people in a blast that touched off raging fires and a blizzard of bloodstained paper from a popular book market.

But, I read it anyway because I don't have any need to go shopping. Then I found something really interesting in the same story.

Meanwhile, a British-Iraqi raid on a police intelligence headquarters in southern Iraq on Sunday found 30 prisoners with signs of torture and an alleged death squad leader was captured.

The raid took place at the National Iraqi Intelligence Agency building in Basra, Iraq's second-largest city 340 miles southeast of Baghdad. Inside, troops discovered the prisoners, including one woman and two children, with signs of torture and abuse, the British military said in a statement. It did not elaborate.

The Iraqi government criticized the raid and on Monday launched an investigation.

"We have a committee that ... has started work to uncover the circumstances of the incident," said Ali al-Dabbagh, a government spokesman.

Al-Maliki had ordered the inquiry a day earlier, and vowed to punish "those who carried out this illegal and irresponsible act," his office said in condemning the raid. Al-Maliki's statement did not mention the prisoners.

Condemning the raid? Criticizing the raid? Given what the raid uncovered one might think the Al-Maliki government would be thankful that the British carried out the raid.

Given the Iraqi government's response, well... I guess the Iraqi government, at the highest levels, is complicit.

I wonder how long it's going to take the Bush and Blair administrations to understand that all they did was replace one brutal regime with another? Iraq is a nation, although severely fractured, that will be governed by a Shi'ite majority, and if the minority groups don't accept it, the state machine will cleanse the country of them.

The question of an exit strategy should be no problem at this point. Without overwhelming concentrations of troops, without eliminating the government which the Bush administration blindly installed without a second thought, without a long period of dominant occupation, nothing can fix what Bush created.

The neo-con dream has fallen flat because, with the attention span of a group of two year-olds, they expected instant gratification for their half-spent effort.

It's time they just packed up and left. The damage is well and truly done.