Iraq

Another article on the increasing tensions in the Kurdish north with Iran and Turkey upping the military presence along the border. I can't help but think the recent rise in violence against the legitimate Kurdish political movement in Iraq (PUK not PKK) by Shia militias is related. Amidst everything else in Iraq, there may be a Kurd/Iran proxy war brewing. (And the Iran sympathetic Maliki government is outright closing Kurdish political offices in Baghdad and the central areas of Iraq.)

Big NYTimes headline(I assume everybody saw it) evidence of a coverup on the killings in Haditha.

In the current Baghdad security operation, 15,000 homes are to be searched.

"He asked me for help to find the bad guys," he said. "I refused. I am not stupid. "Me and my family would be killed most horrifically if they learnt I helped the Americans but the officer was very sad.

"He (the US commanding officer) said he understood but he also said, 'It is so difficult. We do not know where to look. All we want to do is help but we do not know who to target'."

This lack of assistance and detailed intelligence may - like an earlier Iraqi security push six weeks ago - doom the US mission to failure, even if restoring order is possible in a city where sectarian groups are now so polarised by mutual fear and hatred.

In Baghdad, gas lines are reaching a mile long with people spending the night on line. The Iraqi government is doubling the funding for oil imports. But I think the thing to note is that the Iraqi people are blaming the government not the insurgents. The belief is that it's corruption within Maliki's government.

Two more American soldiers were killed in combat, the U.S. command said. (What does it say that I got this headline from a British paper? But Jon Benet.....) (Or maybe you prefer the Turkish press.)

Tom Lasseter, one of the best mainstream reporters out of Iraq, writes about the fear of Iraqi officials and lower level US soldiers that the top line policy makers have no contact, no sense of what's really going on in Iraq at the ground level. (They're right, by the way.)

"All the American policies have failed because the American analysis of the situation is wrong; it is not related to reality," (Parliament member) Saghir said. "The slaughtered Iraqi man on the street conveys the best explanation."

"As an intelligence officer ... I have had the chance to move around Baghdad on mounted and dismounted patrols and see the city and violence from the ground," wrote a U.S. military officer, whose name is being withheld to protect him from possible reprimand.

"I think that the greatest problem that we deal with (besides the insurgents and militia) is that our leadership has no real comprehension of the ground truth. I wish that I could offer a solution, but I can't."

And, if you didn't see it, IED's are up, attacks on civilians are up, and attacks on US troops are up.

"The insurgency has gotten worse by almost all measures, with insurgent attacks at historically high levels," said a senior Defense Department official who was not authorized to speak for attribution.

"The insurgency has more public support and is demonstrably more capable in numbers of people active and in its ability to direct violence than at any point in time."

(Oh, in that other war we don't talk about, the US dropped a bomb on an Afghan government patrol, and the Taliban is shutting schools throughout the south.)