One Week
The rhetoric in Washington has never matched up all that well with the reality on the ground in Iraq. The Bush administration was slow to acknowledge the fast-growing insurgency in the early months of the occupation and was even slower to recognize the building sectarian conflict.
This week showed that not much has changed. In the midst of a particularly bloody week—during which well over 400 Iraqis were killed in a series of tit-for-tat bombings and shootings—Republican presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain went on CNN to talk about how much safer Iraq has become. He claimed (inaccurately) that the U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, drives around Baghdad in an "unarmed humvee"; hours earlier, a burst of mortars rained down on the Green Zone, the best-protected slice of land in the capital.
On the flip side, Democratic war critic Rep. John Murtha continued his push for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq by labeling the violence there "genocide," apparently unaware that the United States is obligated by a 1948 international convention to prevent acts of genocide.
Last week, Democrats in Congress did move beyond mere rhetoric. Four years into the war, the Senate passed a key funding bill that calls for the withdrawal of U.S. troops by March 2008, echoing a House bill that would require withdrawal by Sept. 1, 2008. The Senate's 51-47 margin leaves President Bush able to exercise his promised veto. The Pentagon says that it needs the $90 billion in the bill for Iraq and Afghanistan operations urgently in the coming months. With Bush and the Democrats holding firm, the stage is set for a showdown in Washington when Congress returns from spring recess.
Another, more worrisome showdown could be brewing in Baghdad, where radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr issued yet another broadside attack against the United States a day after 82 people were killed in the bombing of a Shiite market. Sadr called for a nationwide demonstration on April 9, the fourth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad. U.S. soldiers, if not politicians in Washington, will be watching warily.
This story appears in the April 9, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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