This week's US News & World Report is focused on Iraq:
A Pullback, Not A Pullout--Not Yet
Politics, Mesopotamian StyleQuote:
HUWIJA, IRAQ--For hours, soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division chase shadows across the streets of this small Sunni Arab city. The crowds hide a sniper--or more likely, several snipers, who follow military patrols in a car or truck, wait for the American gunners' eyes to turn away, then fire a single shot. The sniper keeps the Americans inside their humvees, generally preventing them from walking the streets and engaging with residents. Over the course of this patrol, the soldiers will be shot at three times by snipers and once by someone with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. Staff Sgt. Michael McMath's humvee, already decorated with five bullet holes collected in the last month, will pick up its sixth. After each shot, the soldiers will scan and search for suspects. Each time, though, the search will come up empty...
Identity Voting in Iraq (by Fouad Ajami)Quote:
BAGHDAD--In his well-appointed living room, Mustafa Ibrahim has been fidgeting in his chair for half an hour. He leans farther and farther forward in ever more intense monologue until he can restrain himself no longer and starts shouting: "The election commission members are all Shiites. They enter all the information in the computers. They started cheating from the first day of the election." Adding to his grievances, he figures--wrongly--that Sunni Arabs like himself compose over half of Iraq's population, and so he is angry that they won only a small fraction of seats in the new 275-member Council of Representatives. His message to the Shiites and Kurds who swept the election: "If they don't make any agreement or compromise, there will be a very brutal war."...
Cracking an Insurgent CellQuote:
A shrewd Iraqi observer, Nibras Kazimi, had it mostly right when he said, a week after the December 15 parliamentary voting, that Iraq had held a census rather than an election. Those who bet against "identity politics" were not vindicated. The big Shiite slate, the United Iraqi Alliance, swept--with a huge margin--the nine Shiite provinces in the south and the Middle Euphrates; the Kurdistan Alliance claimed three provinces in the north (and, by a considerably smaller margin, Kirkuk as well); while the Sunni Arabs delivered their votes to rehabilitated elements of the Baath and to the Sunni Islamist groups that had emerged as their standard-bearers after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Baghdad voted its complex and checkered identity: The Shiite slate had polled 59 percent of the vote, the Sunni parties had taken 19 percent, and the "secular" slate of former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi had taken 14 percent...
Quote:
MOSUL, IRAQ--It is 1:30 p.m. on Saturday, December 10, five days before Iraq's national elections. A red four-door sedan carrying four men cruises through the western half of this freewheeling oil town. The old beater of a car doesn't attract any particular attention before the driver, an 18-year-old called Nashwan, pulls over near a gaggle of campaign workers hanging political posters. A man known as Abu Mahmoud steps out of the car. He draws a handgun. Two other men with guns follow quickly. The campaign workers step back, then begin shouting angrily. Abu Mahmoud points his gun at one of the workers. He fires. The man falls to the ground, dead...
