Iraq....The Saga Continues

As the saga of Tom Delay and John Bolton continue to undercut the Bush legacy he is not getting any help in Iraq. The Washington Post today has a rundown on activity in Iraq over the last couple of days that has resulted in many Iraqi deaths and at least one American death. I'm not going to go into the details here, you can go right to the source.

The post had an even more disturbing report yesterday by Ellen Knickmeyer, Insurgent Violence Escalates In Iraq. She reports that not only is insurgent violence increasing but the Iraqi Security Forces and police that the administration likes to tell us about are afraid to leave their stations.

Violence is escalating sharply in Iraq after a period of relative calm that followed the January elections. Bombings, ambushes and kidnappings targeting Iraqis and foreigners, both troops and civilians, have surged this month while the new Iraqi government is caught up in power struggles over cabinet positions.

Many attacks have gone unchallenged by Iraqi forces in large areas of the country dominated by insurgents, according to the U.S. military, Iraqi officials and civilians and visits by Washington Post correspondents. Hundreds of Iraqis and foreigners have either been killed or wounded in the last week.

You don't want to go there

This week, at a checkpoint bunker in Tarmiya where insurgents downed a helicopter, a teenager in sunglasses clutching an AK-47 marked the limits of the Iraqi army's authority. "I wouldn't advise going there," the young Shiite Muslim recruit said, referring to Tarmiya, a Tigris River town a few hundred yards up the road that is dominated by Sunni Muslim landowners who were loyal to Saddam Hussein. "Those are some bad people there."

No government no security

Meanwhile, the Iraqi leadership remains in limbo.

The attacks, coming as officials continued to haggle over government posts, have eroded some of the hope that followed the elections. Shiite, Sunni, Kurdish and secular leaders, most of whom are building the first democratically elected Iraqi government of their adult lives, have let power struggles fill nearly one-third of their government's planned 11-month run.

At best, deal-making on some key posts appears stuck where it was two weeks ago, when Ibrahim Jafari, a formerly exiled Shiite leader, accepted the prime minister's job and the task of forming a promised national-unity government.
[.......]
"The government is useless! I have stopped depending on it," Ali Hali, a 29-year-old Shiite, cried last week.

So much for Iraqization

Meanwhile, officials describe setbacks in the security situation in the Sunni Muslim city of Husaybah on the Syrian border, near the area where fighters tied to al Qaeda had staged the second of two well-planned attacks on a U.S. military installation this month. An Iraqi army unit that had once grown to 400 members has dwindled to a few dozen guardsmen "holed up'' inside a phosphate plant outside of Husaybah for their protection, a Marine commander said.

Maj. John Reed, executive officer for the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, which has a company in Husaybah, said the Iraqi guardsmen retreated to the phosphate plant compound with their families after insurgents attacked and killed scores of people in recent months.

"They will claim that they've got hundreds ready to come back and fight," said Reed, whose company seldom patrols inside Husaybah. "Well, there are no more than 30 of them on duty on any given day, and they are completely ineffective."

At Tarmiya, along the heavily Sunni-populated banks of the Tigris, Shiite recruits sent by the government usually stay well out of town unless accompanying U.S. patrols, a correspondent for The Post observed. Police officers man a station inside Tarmiya, but they are Sunnis from the same tribes as the townspeople. Even they are seldom seen.

In city after city and town after town, security forces who had signed up to secure Iraq and replace U.S. forces appear to have abandoned posts or taken refuge inside them for fear of attacks.

A way to commit suicide

''We joined the police, and after this, the job became a way of committing suicide,'' said Jasim Khadar Harki, a 28-year-old policeman in Mosul, where residents say patrols are dropping off noticeably, often appearing only in response to attacks.

The worst that any of us could have predicted or imagined seems to be coming true in Iraq. It is probably even worse because journalists are unable to travel in most of the country.