Baghdad is 75% secure according to a Hoover Institution gasbag fellow. Unfortunately, it appears the heavily fortified Green Zone isn’t one of those places:
Baghdad’s heavily protected Green Zone has been hit by mortar bombs or rockets, but there have been no immediate reports of casualties or damage.
A series of at least 10 explosions hit the home to the US embassy and Iraqi government ministries on Saturday, causing a siren to sound warning people to take cover.
Major Brad Leighton, a US military spokesman, said: “I can confirm that we did receive indirect fire and that it was multiple round.”
Mirembe Nantongo, a US embassy spokeswoman, refused to say whether there had been casualties or damaged.
“To maintain operational security, we do not comment on indirect fire into the international ئone,” she said.
But at least unlike the rest of Baghdad, I bet their plumbing still works inside there. Because Americans don’t do wars liberations without indoor plumbing. So as long as none of those mortar shells hit the rest rooms, everything’s jake.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in our safe and secure Iraq ….
(cont.)
NEAR FALLUJA – A tribal leader was killed and a policeman injured when militants, including a suicide bomber, attacked a base used by concerned local citizens — groups formed by Sunni tribal leaders to fight al Qaeda, police said. The attack took place on Saturday in a village near Falluja in Anbar province. […]
BAIJI – A roadside bomb planted outside the house of Nuri Khalil, a municipal council member, killed his wife and wounded his son in Baiji, 180 km (112 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.
BAGHDAD – Two bodies were found in different districts in Baghdad on Friday, police said.
BAGHDAD – A car bomb blew up in Baghdad’s central Karrada district on Friday, killing three people and wounding seven others, police said.
NINEVEH PROVINCE – The Iraqi army and police killed three gunmen and arrested two others on Friday when they raided a town near the Syrian border in, northwestern Iraq, the spokesman for Nineveh operations, Brigadier-General Khalid Abdul-Sattar, said.
Oh, and lest we forget, they still kill horses, don’t they?
BAGHDAD (Reuters) – A bomb strapped to a horse-drawn cart exploded in central Baghdad on Friday, killing one person, while a car bomb killed three people north of the capital, Iraqi security officials said.
But it isn’t just Baghdad where all the slaughter continues. What about one of those stabilized provinces where the Iraqis manage their own security, and US troops aren’t needed to keep the peace, like say Basra in Southern Iraq? Well, everyone is having a grand old time doing unto their neighbors what their neighbors are doing unto them:
BASRA, Iraq — This southern port city has been, in effect, on its own since September, when British forces here moved to the outskirts, yielding authority to local leaders. British and American officials say Basra’s experiment in self-rule could serve as a model for Iraq’s future, but if so — many locals and outside advisers say — that future remains dark.
What makes the situation in Basra — Iraq’s second largest city and commercial hub — so alarming, they say, is that it is a test of Iraqi rule under relatively optimal conditions: Basra has the nation’s best economic base, little ethnic tension within a homogeneous Shiite population and no Western occupation force to inflame nationalist tensions.
Yet the city remains deeply troubled. Disappearances of doctors, teachers and other professionals are common, as are some clashes among competing militias, most of which are linked to political parties. Murder victims include judicial investigators, politicians and tribal sheiks. One especially disturbing trend is the slaying of at least 100 women in the last year, according to the police. The Iraqi authorities have blamed Shiite militiamen for many of those killing, saying the militants had probably deemed the women to be impious.
“Most of the killings are done by gunmen in police cars,” said Sheik Khadem al-Ribat, a Basra tribal leader who claims no party membership. He spoke of the militias in an antechamber of his downtown mosque, his voice barely above a whisper. “These cars were given to the political parties. There are supposed to be 16,000 policemen, but we see very few of them on the street, and most of the ones we do see are militiamen dressed as police.” […]
It is this daily violence intermingled with normal politics that seems most worrying, experts here say.
“They have these overlapping spheres of gangsterism and politics, militias and legitimate businesses, and legitimate politics,” said Rob Tinline, a spokesman for the British Provincial Reconstruction Team.
Iraq’s security forces are the most conspicuous example of the tension between politics and violence in Basra, and the aptly named Serious Crimes Unit of the Basra Police is perhaps the most egregious example. The British Army determined that the unit was a death squad linked to Shiite militias and dispatched Warrior tanks in December 2006 to pound the rogue force’s headquarters to rubble.
Thank god the conventional wisdom back in these United States is that the Surge is working. It would be terrible if anyone suggested it was a complete failure after all. That would increase the pressure to bring our troops home, and we can’t have any of that now, can we.
Better to paint a pretty picture of success, than curse the darkness. That will make it easier to finish constructing our permanent bases for one thing. Why, pretty soon if things keep up like this Iraq will become a vacation hot spot for that new niche of travelers, war zone tourists. I mean why should Congress critters like John McCain have all the fun?
In fact, I would recommend this venture to President Bush. Might defray some of the cost of supplying the troops. I figure charging each person $3,000 per day for an embedded tour of duty with one of our combat brigades would be a fair price, don’t you? Of course, if they want to fire weapons and actually kill something that would be extra. And the usual liability waivers and assumption of risk forms would apply. Because we can’t have some disgruntled warblogger suing the US government for any injuries he sustained while riding around in an up-armored Humvee. That wouldn’t be right.