(Financial Times) A Pentagon spokesman on Friday confirmed that US troop levels in Iraq rose to 132,000 during the past week – the highest since late May – from 127,000 at the start of the week.

On Thursday, the Pentagon said it would extend for up to 120 days the 3,700-strong deployment of the 172nd Stryker brigade in Iraq, among other rotations. There were 3,169 Iraqis killed in June, compared with 1,778 in January.

Essentially, to make sure that they are kept in the headlines, and to capitalize on the most recent US sentiment, insurgents are making more aggressive attacks in an effort to stir up secular unrest.

However, the insurgent groups are not the only ones:

George W. Bush […] also faces growing difficulties with Iraq’s new government, which is making anti-US noises to shore up its credibility with Iraqis. Mr Maliki is under domestic pressure to demand that trials of US soldiers take place in Iraq. The US says this is not possible.

Makes one wonder how exactly we’ll actually be able to pull out without leaving an all out civil war in our wake. With Israel and Lebanon continuing to escalate, Taiwan potentially working to provoke China, Venezuela and Iran making friends, and of course North Korea, the UN seems even more impotent than ever. Where do you think the answers really are?

Read this POST by fellow blogger TIME for an in depth essay that examines the simularities between today's Iraq, and Churchill's Iraq of 1920. The dates change, but the problems remain the same, and you'll see Churchill asked the same question many Americans ask today.