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Baghdad Barriers

Building Walls to Stop the Religious War

By Georg Mascolo and Bernhard Zand

Insurgents in Iraq are using tremendous brutality to ensure that Baghdad is carved up along religious lines. Meanwhile, Democrats in the United States are pushing for a military withdrawal from Iraq, and even Republicans are looking into ways to bring home the troops.

On the truly bad days since he embarked on his third tour of duty in Iraq -- and that applies to most days -- David Petraeus tries to maintain distance and an overview of the situation. That's when Petraeus, the Commander of US troops in Iraq, puts on a set of headphones and directs a helicopter pilot through the skies over Baghdad. "On a bad day, I actually fly to Baghdad just to reassure myself that life still goes on," Petraeus recently told the Washington Post. For the general, every Iraqi patrol car he catches sight of from the air, every flickering light from an amusement park and every child kicking around a soccer ball behind a house serves as proof that there is still hope.

The most ambitious security offensive to date began in Baghdad more than two months ago. Since then, 50,000 additional Iraqi and about 13,000 American troops have been sent to the Iraqi capital, and two additional US brigades are scheduled to follow by June. Nevertheless, the situation in Baghdad is getting worse by the minute. The number of devastating attacks continues to rise, as do the number of military casualties. By last Friday, 90 GIs had been killed in April alone. At the start of this year, the Iraqi government stopped announcing death tolls -- be they civilian or military.

Petraeus appeared before the United States Congress last Wednesday to ask for more time to complete the mission. According to the general, it will take until September to determine whether the massive troop buildup will be able to improve the situation.

Two clocks are ticking here: one very slowly in Baghdad and another with increasing speed in Washington. US President George W. Bush has announced that he will veto any legislation proposed by the Democrats to set a deadline for troop withdrawal. But the Democrats expect the surge of bad news from Iraq to cause even the Republicans to lose their nerve, and they plan to call for a vote on one withdrawal plan after the other in the coming months.

Dissent within the ranks

Bush knows how hopeless the situation is, even in the eyes of the military. Several retired generals have already turned down his offer to serve as a sort of White House "czar" who would oversee the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the post remains unfilled. There is also dissent within the ranks. In a startling essay in the military publication Armed Forces Journal, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling accuses US generals in Iraq of "intellectual and moral failures." Yingling writes: "They underestimated the strength of the enemy, overestimated the capabilities of Iraq's government ... and failed to provide Congress with an accurate assessment of security conditions in Iraq."

Exactly four years have passed since Bush's now-legendary declaration of victory on board the USS Abraham Lincoln, but just how far the United States remains from a "mission accomplished" is being demonstrated this week once again. The foreign ministers of Iraq's neighboring countries are meeting in the Egyptian resort of Sharm al-Sheikh on Thursday and Friday to discuss their interests in the country.

In Washington and at the US embassy in Baghdad, members of Congress, senators and diplomats are agonizing over how to convince the Iraqi government to finally take on its share of the responsibility for bringing peace to the tortured country -- by at least making an attempt to bring about national reconciliation between Shiites and Sunnis, enacting a fair oil law and achieving a compromise in the increasingly tense situation in Kirkuk, a multiethnic city claimed by the Kurds.