A war on rewind, in a bleaker Baghdad (AP reporter Charles Hanley back in Iraq after 14 months)

[Barrett808]

A war on rewind, in a bleaker Baghdad
By CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP Special Correspondent
Tue Jun 19, 4:07 PM ET

BAGHDAD - In Iraq, after four years and three months of war, the echoes have begun to echo themselves.

American troops are taking Baghdad's streets back from insurgents. The prime minister has a plan for national reconciliation. To the south, in the "triangle of death," two U.S. soldiers are missing, captives in enemy hands.

Those were the headlines a year ago. Now they're being heard again in the newscasts of today, like some grim rewinding of a movie tragedy, of a story that never ends.

At the White House last June, back from a secretive trip to Baghdad, an upbeat President Bush told reporters assembled in the Rose Garden, "I sense something different happening in Iraq."

It's June again and those roses are once more in bloom. But in Baghdad the scene looks only bleaker.

To a visitor returning after a year, the something different is the spread of concrete blast barriers across ever more of the city, the accumulation of still more rubble, the sectarian "cleansing" of neighborhoods, the ruin of still more lives — of friends whose loved ones have fled, been kidnapped, been killed. And for those left behind, life is worse.

...

Young soldiers' attitudes are suffering, too, after repeat tours in Iraq. Almost half in a Pentagon survey released last month said their unit's morale is low or very low. Morale took a fresh blow when the Army announced that 12-month tours would be extended to 15.

For Iraq's army and police, the losses were even heavier. And after easing earlier this year, the toll on civilians appears to be rising again in the unending cycle of sectarian killings by Sunni Muslim bombers and Shiite Muslim death squads. Last month was one of the bloodiest on record — by Associated Press count, at least 2,155 civilians and Iraqi security forces were killed.

This war has survived countless "turning points," including last June's killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, a U.S. success some in Washington touted as a prelude to a "sea change" in U.S. fortunes.

It wasn't. Now U.S. hopes rest on "Imposing the Law," the four-month-old security crackdown, a "surge" of U.S. reinforcements billed as a promising change of strategy. But this, too, is another echo — of "Together Forward," launched in June last year, and "Lightning" of a year before that.

...

Along with the everyday threats of death, Baghdadis have had to grapple, even more than they did a year ago, with the slow collapse of everyday life.

Electricity, available a few hours a day, grows scarcer. Four years after the U.S. vowed to restore power, the supply in early June was 8 percent below the 2006 level. Oil production, vital to Iraq's economy, remains crippled — at levels even lower than last June's production. The queues at gasoline stations sap hours of people's days.

(more)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070619/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_deja_vu