I'm going to be starting a short embed tomorrow (back Saturday).  I ought to be able to keep blogging, but there's always a chance I'll either be too busy or not within reach of an internet connection.  Since it's a short trip I'm probably not going to lug a satellite modem along unless absolutely necessary.  I spoke this afternoon with a guy who has some insight into what's going on in Baghdad, and have more interviews lined up for tomorrow before the embed starts.

Things are bad right now, but they aren't orders of magnitude worse than they were last week.  For understandable reasons people are focused on when and if a civil war is going to break out.  So events like the Jihad Massacre are analyzed in terms of whether they might send the violence soaring to new levels.  But the greater risk is that things will just keep getting a little bit worse every day.  Even if things don't get worse, even if they just stay this way indefinitely, it will be a disaster.  Dozens of people die in Iraq every day, and it's starting to look like national reconciliation is very far off.  It kind of looked like that all along, but there were some legit signs for a while that a little progress was being made.

For the violence to end there has to be some political consensus about how to move forward peacefully, and the groups that reject that consensus have to be defeated militarily.  At the moment, despite a security plan that's put 70,000 soldiers and cops out and about in Baghdad, the streets seem to belong to the militiamen and the insurgents.  I have a lot of trouble judging the sincerity of politicians, and deciphering how much of what they say and do is just theater.  But one way or the other there's a disconnect between calls for national reconciliation and this cycle of sectarian massacres.  Either the politicians are insincere or they aren't in control of events (or both).

The other riddle is what the American military can do and is doing to keep things from getting worse.  I don't think the mere presence of American troops is making things worse.  The invasion may have unleashed these forces but that doesn't mean you can hit rewind and make it all go away by sending all the American soldiers and Marines back to the United States.  In Baghdad Iraqis are mostly fighting each other, and I doubt they'd suddenly realize they like each other if the US picked up stakes and left.  But it's hard to say if the US can do much to get between the factions fighting it out in Baghdad.  The Army could, for a while at least, marginalize the Iraqi Army and Police and reassert day-to-day control over a lot of neighborhoods.  More Americans would die, fewer Iraqis would die.  But all that does is get things back to where they were a year ago.  If there's a lasting solution I don't know what it is.

 

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