A Summer Of Tears
A seemingly endless wave of car bombings Leaves Many Iraqis--and Americans--in Despair
BAGHDAD--From dusk till dawn, chaos reigned. As darkness fell last Wednesday, three apparently synchronized bombs exploded in a Shiite neighborhood, killing 23 people. With the rising sun came four more blasts in another Shiite part of Baghdad that killed at least 17 Iraqis. The dead were found in two mosques, a shopping area, and a bathhouse. Even in a city becoming inured to such horrors, this seemed staggering in its intensity--and its audacity.
A surge of suicide attacks--largely against civilian targets--has had almost no military effect on American forces nor any significant impact on the development of the Iraqi Army. But the bombs nonetheless have proved quite effective--on both sides of the globe. In Iraq, the bloodshed adds to the fear and uncertainty and undermines the standing of the fragile democratic government; in the United States, the daily accounts of suicide attacks undercut assertions by President Bush and his top generals that meaningful progress is being made in Iraq. While the generals downplay the bombings' military impact, they are beginning to worry about signs of declining public support at home--a concern also articulated by some in Congress who have backed the war. "I'm here to tell you, sir, in the most patriotic state that I can imagine, people are beginning to question," Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld last week. "And I don't think it's a blip on the radar screen. I think we have a chronic problem on our hands."
Tuesday marks the first anniversary of the United States' handing sovereignty to a transitional government in Iraq. And the Bush administration is using the anniversary to highlight the progress made since then and to try to rebuild confidence in the face of declining poll numbers. "Any who say we have lost or are losing are flat wrong," Rumsfeld testified last week. "We are not." President Bush will send a similar stay-the-course message in a prime-time speech Tuesday to troops at Fort Bragg, N.C. But the administration needs to take care. Vice President Dick Cheney said the insurgency was in its "last throes" --only to be contradicted by his generals in Iraq and Washington. "I believe there are more foreign fighters coming into Iraq than there were six months ago," Gen. John Abizaid, who heads the U.S. Central Command, told Congress. The strength of the insurgency, he added, is "about the same" as it was six months ago.
Tricky business. The generals in Baghdad believe the U.S. forces are fighting, in essence, two wars in Iraq. One is against former members of Saddam Hussein's regime, Sunni Baathists who see no future in an Iraq dominated by the American-backed Shiite majority. The other is against hard-line Islamic extremists, some, like Abu Musab Zarqawi, loosely aligned with al Qaeda. It is this group that uses suicide bombers, most often against Iraqis. The targets of the suicide bombers are increasingly Shiite and Kurdish civilians, suggesting to U.S. military officers that the extremists' goal is to foment civil war and derail accord on a new constitution later this year.
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