Word: baghdad
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...truth, Baghdad is nothing like normal and still some distance from safe. The number of sectarian killings is down, but few Sunnis dare to venture into Shi'ite neighborhoods, and vice versa. U.S. military commanders, whose efforts have led to the sharp reduction in violence, have been cautioning against reading too much into the statistics. "Nobody says anything about turning a corner, seeing lights at the end of tunnels, any of those phrases," General David Petraeus told journalists on Dec. 6. "There's nobody in uniform who is doing victory dances in the end zone...
...living in exile don't need to be told it's too soon to celebrate. Most carry terrible memories of the violence that forced them to flee in the first place. Many refugees lost loved ones, either to the Shi'ite mobs that rampaged unchecked through the streets of Baghdad several times last year or to reprisal killings by Sunni insurgents. The Awadis were lucky: they had fair warning. Adnan still remembers the strong body odor of the six armed men from the Shi'ite Mahdi Army militia who walked into his office at the Health Ministry and demanded that...
...Baghdad may be safer than it was, but people like the Awadis worry that the gains of the surge are temporary and predicated on a massive American presence. They point out that Iraq's political leadership has failed to use the relative calm to engineer any real reconciliation between the majority Shi'ites and the Sunnis. While U.S. troops have battled al-Qaeda in Baghdad, Anbar and Diyala, the Iraqi Parliament has made little progress on critical legislation in more than a year. And partly because of massive government corruption, improvements in basic services like electricity, water and fuel have...
...Sadr, leader of the Mahdi Army, ordered it not to attack American troops. But U.S. commanders on the ground know there was no goodwill behind the decision. "It wasn't because Sadr saw Jesus--let's put it that way," says Major Christopher Coglianese, a staff officer in Baghdad. More likely, the Mahdi Army is waiting for the Americans to begin their drawdown from Baghdad next year. Sunnis worry that when the U.S. troops leave, the Shi'ite militias will resume their pogroms...
...narrowing stem-cell research, Republicans have more recently managed to get themselves on the wrong side of popular trends on what were once old reliables: foreign policy, economics, energy, even health care. Iraq is still somewhat taboo in Republican debates, so fearful are the candidates that the situation in Baghdad might again deteriorate. Thanks to Katrina and several war-contracting scandals, the party has squandered its bragging rights on running a more efficient government. "We've lost, clearly, some of the moral high ground on the larger issues of taxes and spending," says South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford...