the surge, and game of chicken with iran (englehart):
In the meantime, while the Americans could point to a drop in Iraqi civilian deaths in the capital (along with a rise in American ones), overall Iraqi deaths throughout the country were, not surprisingly, surging as guerrilla operations and sectarian struggles simply shifted to places of less American strength.
(..) Meanwhile, a dangerous game of chicken is being played out at the edge of some cliff by the Bush administration and its Iranian counterparts – with kidnapped Iranian diplomats-cum-Revolutionary-Guards held somewhere in America's Iraqi prison mini-gulag, those British sailors taken hostage by Iranian Revolutionary Guards (and then freed), an American ex-FBI agent mysteriously missing in Iran, and the report from Robert Fisk of the British Independent that "the U.S. military intends to place as many as five mechanized brigades – comprising about 40,000 men – south and east of Baghdad, at least three of them positioned between the capital and the Iranian border. This would present Iran with a powerful – and potentially aggressive – American military force close to its border in the event of a U.S. or Israeli military strike against its nuclear facilities later this year."