Last week, young Mister Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki agreed to enhance security in Baghdad by moving at least 4,000 additional U.S. troops and 4,000 additional Iraqi troops to the city. According to the New York Times, there are now 9,000 American troops, 8,500 Iraqi soldiers and 34,500 Iraqi police officers deployed in Iraq’s capital city. That makes for an overall security force of 52,000 in a single city. Compare that to the Chicago Police Department, whose roughly 13,600 officers keep peace in America’s third most populous city of 2.8 million.
Under the fold: more central fronts than you can shake a stick at…
No, you can’t equate the security situation in Chicago with the one in Baghdad. But the disparity in the size of their peacekeeping forces should give you some perspective on the size of the security problem in Baghdad. And according to NYT’s Kirk Semple, today’s Baghdad is still making the Chicago of the Al Capone era look like a Garden of Eden.
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 1 — Two separate attacks aimed at Iraqi soldiers killed at least 28 people today and wounded at least 34, officials said, as American and Iraqi generals continued to shift troops to Baghdad as part of their retooled strategy to roll back surging violence in the capital.
[…]
According to statistics from the Iraqi government and collated by the United Nations, an average of more than 100 civilians of day were killed in June, many in the capital.
Much of the recent violence has been driven by sectarian death squads, including Sunni insurgents seeking to topple the national government and stealth Shiite militiamen operating under the cover of Iraq’s Shiite-controlled security forces.
These “Shiite-controlled security forces” would include the 43,000 Iraqi’s and police that those 9,000 American troops are now operating with in Baghdad.
Where are the Untouchables of yesteryear?
The Other Central Front
In the other “central front” of the so-called Global War on Terror, approximately 10,000 Israeli troops pushed into Lebanon yesterday.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, whose military service to his country rivals that of Dick Cheney, said of the expanding Israeli operation that, “We are at the beginning of a political process that in the end will bring a cease-fire under entirely different conditions than before… “This [Hezbollah] threat will not be what it was… Never will they be able to threaten this people they fired missiles at. This people will defeat them.”
One has to suspect that Olmert and Cheney tug at the same brand of bourbon when they go quail hunting or pull their countries into war. If this little conflict eliminates the threat of Hezbollah to Israel, cheddar cheese is a cure for constipation.
What a shame it is that the neoconservatives in power in both America and Israel are creating a situation from which whoever gets tagged with cleaning up their mess can only do so by gorging themselves on roast crow in front of the international community.
Which, no doubt, is a key component of the neocons’ recovery strategy.
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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.
