Bush's Next Big Lie: 75% Reduction in Sectarian Violence

Baghdad has become more segregated. Sunni Muslims in the capital now live in ghettos encircled by concrete blast walls to stop militia attacks and car bombs. Shiite militias continue to push to control the city's last mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhoods in the southwest, by murdering and intimidating Sunni residents and, sometimes, their Shiite neighbors. Services haven't improved across most of the capital ?- the international aid group Oxfam reported in July that only 30 percent of Iraqis have access to clean water, compared with 50 percent in 2003 ?- and tens of thousands of Iraqis are fleeing their homes each month in search of safety.

Iraqi security forces remain heavily infiltrated by militias, and political leaders continue to intervene in their activities.

Civilian deaths haven't decreased in any significant way across the country, according to statistics from the Iraqi Interior Ministry, and numbers gathered by McClatchy Newspapers show no consistent downward trend even in Baghdad, despite military assertions to the contrary. The military has provided no hard numbers to back the claim.

The only sign of progress is in the homogenous Sunni Arab province of Anbar, where tribes have turned on al Qaida in Iraq and established relative security in a once violent area. But that success has little to do with the 4,000 U.S. troops who were sent to Anbar as part of the surge of 30,000 additional troops to Iraq. Instead, it began more than four months earlier, with the formation last September of the Anbar Salvation Council to fight the escalating terror of Sunni extremists. Officials agree that the anti-Islamist coalition in Anbar has yet to ally itself with the Shiite-led government in Baghdad, and a recent National Intelligence Estimate warned that it might even threaten it.

Elsewhere in Iraq, violence continues to flourish. In the north since the surge began, suspected Sunni extremists have carried out some of the deadliest terror attacks of the war, killing hundreds in car and truck bombings.

In the southern city of Basra, death tolls have increased as rival Shiite militias square off for control.

American politicians have focused on the Iraqi government's inability to meet a series of benchmarks designed to mark steps toward reconciliation. A Government Accountability Office report last week said that the Iraqi government has failed to meet 11 of the 18 benchmarks and had partially met only four others.

A preliminary White House report in July gave better marks but still pronounced little hope that compromise was near on key issues such as the division of oil revenues, the role in government of former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath party and the setting of a schedule for provincial elections. The National Intelligence Estimate by the country's 16 intelligence agencies concurred last month.

Bush administration officials are expected to praise recent agreements by some Iraqi leaders and Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki to work toward compromise. But Maliki's cabinet still has nearly as many vacancies as it has sitting ministers, and no major legislation governing Iraq's major issues, including a militia disarmament program, has made it to the floor of the Iraqi parliament.

Last week, the parliament, back from its summer vacation, barely had a quorum in its first meetings.

BAGHDAD

Taking control of Iraq's capital city was at the center of Bush's surge strategy in January. At least half the U.S. troop surge is taking place here and surrounding suburbs, where the U.S. focused on establishing so-called joint security outposts in Iraqi neighborhoods to be closer to areas where sectarian violence was claiming dozens of lives each day.

The military threw up concrete walls across the capital to foil car bombs and stop Shiite militia members or Sunni insurgents from entering targeted neighborhoods. One military official said U.S. troops were erecting walls as "fast as they could build them." Most "hardened" neighborhoods, encircled with towering gray walls and with single entrances and exits, are Sunni enclaves, military officials said.

The result is a city now sharply divided into sectarian boroughs where the battle lines have only hardened. Some Baghdad residents say they feel somewhat safer in their neighborhoods, but they fear traveling anywhere else in the capital.

Falah Amin, 52, a Sunni from Adhamiyah, called her neighborhood in northeast Baghdad a prison. Adhamiyah was among the first neighborhoods to be walled off by the U.S. military to protect it from Sunni car bombs and Shiite militias.

"We've been separated from the rest of our city as if we have the plague," Amin said.

The neighborhood, Amin said, is virtually empty. Those left don't have the money or connections to leave, she said.

"Is this to keep us safe or to keep all those outside the wall from seeing what is taking place inside the walled area?" she asked.

Amin expects the worst if U.S. troops pull out and leave Adhamiyah to the Iraqi security forces and a government she doesn't trust.

"First, they will empty Baghdad of the Sunnis, then they will think about security, real security, not now."

Even Shiite residents are concerned. "If the U.S. troops leave, (the Shiite militias) will be free and we will have a Shiite Taliban," said Mohammed al Kabi, 39, a Shiite and once hard-line follower of Shiite cleric Muqtada al Sadr. "I don't believe that the Iraqi government can control the security situation because some of the high-ranking officials cooperate with the militias."

Outside the walled-in neighborhoods, the push to drive Sunnis from Shiite neighborhoods continues in a city that U.S. military officers say has gone from being 65 percent Sunni to being 75 percent Shiite.

woiyo has fallen into the same trap as Powell, Rice, and almost everybody in this administration; they see progress where there are none.

They refuse to acknolwedge the higher death toll, and the lack of security that only worsens every year.

Blind, ding-bats.

cicerone imposter wrote:

woiyo has fallen into the same trap as Powell, Rice, and almost everybody in this administration; they see progress where there are none.

They refuse to acknolwedge the higher death toll, and the lack of security that only worsens every year.

Blind, ding-bats.

So once again, we have you who knows better than our military about the actual conditions on the ground.

You put your faith in Nancy Pelosi and Ted Kennedy but not the troops on the ground.

You are the reason this govt and this nation is falling into uncertain, insecure times.

So go back to name calling since you do not have the intellectual capacity to objectively analysis anything but your belly-button.

cicerone imposter wrote:

woiyo has fallen into the same trap as Powell, Rice, and almost everybody in this administration; they see progress where there are none.

They refuse to acknolwedge the higher death toll, and the lack of security that only worsens every year.

Blind, ding-bats.

So once again, we have you who knows better than our military about the actual conditions on the ground.

You put your faith in Nancy Pelosi and Ted Kennedy but not the troops on the ground.

You are the reason this govt and this nation is falling into uncertain, insecure times.

So go back to name calling since you do not have the intellectual capacity to objectively analysis anything but your belly-button.

cicerone imposter wrote:

woiyo has fallen into the same trap as Powell, Rice, and almost everybody in this administration; they see progress where there are none.

They refuse to acknolwedge the higher death toll, and the lack of security that only worsens every year.

Blind, ding-bats.

So once again, we have you who knows better than our military about the actual conditions on the ground.

You put your faith in Nancy Pelosi and Ted Kennedy but not the troops on tthe ground.

You are the reason this govt and this nation is falling into uncertain, insecure times.

So go back to name calling since you do not have the intellectual capacity to objectively analysis anything but your belly-button.