Iraq Update

Over the weekend at least 80 people were killed in a mortar attack in Sadr City in Iraq. Reports put the injured at around 200 in various explosions in and around Sadr City, a largely Shiite area.

These attacks, close on the heels of the February 22nd bombing of the Shiite Shrine, pushes an already dangerously divided country closer to civil war. Of course that was the point of the attack.

Hazim al-Araji, a spokesman for the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose followers maintain a large presence in Sadr City, said on al-Jazeera satellite television that 50 people had been killed and more than 295 injured in the explosions. He also said the blasts appeared to have been coordinated.

In a related story, Reuters reports that three years after the Bagdad Airport was captured by American Forces, it is still not secure.

A "security incident" at Baghdad airport prompted the U.S. embassy to bar employees from using commercial flights on Sunday.

Unconfirmed reports from private security contractors in the Iraqi capital said explosives had been found before they were loaded onto a commercial airline flight on Saturday. But Iraq's Transport Ministry flatly denied any such incident took place.

Baghdad airport is surrounded by the main U.S. military base in Iraq. Explosives were once found on an airliner before take-off and a cargo jet was struck by a missile and narrowly avoided crashing.

Planes landing and taking off perform a dizzying corkscrew maneuver to gain or lose height rapidly before leaving the boundaries of the airport in order to avoid missiles.

People (and by 'people' I mean conservatives) called Bill Clinton's intervention in Bosnia every sort of disaster imaginable. The Debacle in the Desert makes Clinton's efforts to bring peace and democracy to an ethnically divided country in a volatile part of the world look like a shining example of the good that a well planned and internationally supported and sanctioned intervention can bring.

The Courtesans of King George loves to say things like "We make our own reality." No matter how many times a Bush Administration official stands up and declare that there is no civil war, it DOES NOT change the reality on the ground. The failure of Dear Leader to acknowledge things that don't fit with his ideology has doomed his efforts in Iraq. Things will get worse. People will start to notice.

BushCo^tm is growing a credibility gap. The more his administration maintains that everything in Iraq is peachy, the wider the gap between what he says and what people see will get. At some point, people will realize they're being scammed.

Iraq Civil War Bush