Word: itely
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...Iraq as the war enters its sixth summer. While the GAO doesn't contradict a Pentagon report that indicates violence in Iraq has dropped significantly, it claims the improvement is based on a rickety foundation provided by the now slowing U.S. troop surge, a creaky cease-fire with Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and a U.S.-led effort to recruit former insurgents for policing--not on any sustained reforms needed for lasting peace. The GAO says that only 10% of Iraqi army battalions have reached operational readiness, a claim the Pentagon calls "misleading." The Pentagon also criticizes...
...current lull in violence, the GAO contends, is like a stool that rests on three legs: the U.S. troop surge, a creaky cease-fire declared by Shi'ite militias loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr and a U.S.-led effort to hire former insurgents to guard their neighborhoods - hardly a platform for sustainable political and social reform. Indeed, the GAO accuses the Pentagon of cherry-picking the information from Iraq that substantiates the claim of progress and ignoring more unpalatable indicators...
...another. The congressional watchdog office cites the so-called "Sons of Iraq" program, a largely Sunni group of militiamen now paid by U.S. taxpayers to keep the peace in their neighborhoods. More than 100,000 strong, the group has yet to reconcile its long-standing differences with the Shi'ite-led government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. U.S. efforts to integrate these forces into the formal Iraq security forces are moving slowly, and only 14,000 militiamen have made the leap so far. What happens if the U.S. stops funding such rent-a-cops is anyone's guess, Pentagon...
...Captain Rahman, himself a Shi'a, refused to be intimidated. He added 70 Sunni officers to what had been a 225-strong, exclusively Shi'ite force, and began aggressively patrolling the streets, in conjunction with the U.S. military, to rid the city of its criminal militias. Inevitably, he found himself accused of bias by the Mahdi Army and its media, which accused him of being an agent, alternately, of the U.S., Israel and al-Qaeda. Death threats soon followed, and his fiancee's family's home was robbed...
...While Captain Rahman was willing to endure threats and harassment from street thugs, the fate of his career, he says, was decided by Sadrists and other radical Shi'ite elements in the police chain of command. The trouble began, Rahman recalls, when his superiors urged him to lighten up on the Mahdi Army, and balance arrests of of Shi'ites by collaring more Sunnis. When he refused to arrest by quota, he says, the police department began investigating claims by Shi'ite detainees that he had abused and stolen from suspects. "None of this is true," he says, "They...