U.S. News and World Report: Hell to Pay

[deadparrot]

The fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks was marked with the sadness and solemnity appropriate to the day, with President Bush sharing the rituals of public mourning at ground zero, at the farmer's field in Shanksville, Pa., and at the Pentagon. But it was clearly another troubled place that weighed on him, as he capped the commemoration with a prime-time TV address that drew on 9/11 emotions to appeal for greater public support on Iraq. "The safety of America," the president declared, "depends on the outcome of the battle in the streets of Baghdad."

Most Americans, though, don't seem to see it that way. Polls show that a majority believes that the country is, in fact, now less safe from terrorism because of the war in Iraq. At every opportunity, Bush is pressing his case that things in Iraq are headed in the right direction-and that the war must be won. But with elections just weeks away, some vulnerable lawmakers may have shuddered after opening the Washington Post last week to see a column by influential conservatives William Kristol and Rich Lowry calling for the president to send "substantially more" troops to Iraq to "improve the chances of winning a decisive battle at a decisive moment."

The mean streets of Iraq last week saw some 130 bodies, most bullet-riddled and bearing signs of torture, collected in just one 48-hour period, even as U.S. and Iraqi troops launched neighborhood-by-neighborhood security sweeps. Despite a "spike" in sectarian killings, U.S. military officials in Baghdad cited progress in security operations by 12,000 American and Iraqi soldiers in other areas of the capital. Iraqi officials also unveiled a security plan to encircle the capital with trenches and route all vehicle and pedestrian traffic through just 28 entry checkpoints.

But nothing in Iraq, it seems, is simple. Congress's Government Accountability Office last week reported that the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency concluded that sectarian tensions have been fueled in part by the same national elections that Washington has hailed as milestones. Even amid spiraling Sunni-Shiite violence, the GAO report said, U.S.-led coalition forces remained the main target of attacks, which increased nearly 60 percent during the first six months of this year over a year ago.

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/060917/25iraq.htm