on the surge (p. cockburn):
The so-called 'surge', the dispatch of 20,000 extra American troops to Iraq with the prime mission of getting control of Baghdad, is visibly failing.
(...) There are army and police checkpoints everywhere but Iraqis are terrified approaching them because they do not know if the men in uniform they see are in reality death squad members. Omar, the 15-year-old brother-in-law of a friend, was driving with two other boys through al-Mansur in west Baghdad a fortnight ago. Their car was stopped at a police checkpoint. Most of the police in Baghdad are Shia. They took him away saying they suspected that his ID card was a fake. The real reason was probably that the name Omar is used only by Sunni. Three days later the boy was found dead.
(...) The problem about the US security plan is that it does not provide security. It had some impact to begin with and the number of dead bodies found in the street went down. This was mainly because the largest Shia militia, the Mehdi Army, was stood down by its leader, Muqtada al-Sadr. But the Sunni insurgent groups escalated the number of sectarian suicide bombings against Shia markets. The US was unable to stop this.
(...) The failure of the 'surge' comes because it is not accompanied by any political reconciliation. On the contrary the government is wholly factionalised. For instance the two vice presidents, the Sunni Tariq al- Hashimi, and the Shia Adel Abdel Mehdi, may make conciliatory statements in public but one Iraqi observer notes that "Tariq only employs Sunni and Adel only Shia."
(...) A bizarre flavour has been given to Saadoun Street because the government has encouraged artists to paint the giant concrete blast barriers with uplifting if unlikely scenes of mountain torrents, meadows in spring and lake side scenes. Many of the pictures, all in garish greens, blues and yellows, look more like Switzerland than Iraq. Muqtada al-Sadr, for his part, is encouraging artists to paint the blast barriers with scenes illustrating the anguish inflicted on the Iraqi people by the US occupation.
(...) Entering the zone recently I was questioned and searched, at different stages, by Kurds, Georgians, Peruvians and Nepalese. No country in the world has such rigorous frontier procedures as what one American called "this little chunk of Texas." Living cut off in the zone it is impossible for the ruling elite of Iraq to understand the terrible suffering and terror beyond its gates.