Word: sectarianism
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...Zarqawi is dead," President Bush said this morning, "but the difficult and necessary mission in Iraq continues. We can expect the terrorists and insurgents to carry on without him. We can expect the sectarian violence to continue. Yet the ideology of terror has lost one of its most visible and aggressive leaders." The President could afford to be muted because the magnitude of the victory was obvious. "We thought we were never going to catch a break," said a relieved Presidential adviser...
Truth be told, however, if American forces were more aggressively engaged in a real counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq--where our primary objective would be to secure Iraqis and their homes from insurgent and sectarian threat--we would have seen more American abuses. Successful counterinsurgencies are always ugly and morally challenging. What is so sad in Iraq is that the civilian losses caused by the U.S. are not compensated by a larger American military effort to secure the country from holy warriors, insurgents and sectarian militiamen who live to slaughter innocent civilians and Iraq's chance for a more humane, democratic...
...same day that Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki announced that the government would launch an investigation into the 24 Haditha killings and called U.S. attacks against Iraqi civilians "a regular occurrence," at least 18 Iraqis died at the hands of their countrymen. The rate of sectarian killings has escalated sharply since the Feb. 22 bombing of a major Shi'ite shrine in Samarra. In Baghdad alone, morgue officials say they have received at least 3,500 bodies since the bombing. Some of those officials have told TIME they routinely understated the toll because of political pressure from...
...missed a basic point about metrics and war. The only real measure of defeating the insurgency is a reduction in their attacks and numbers - not ancillary questions like how many Iraqi units are fit to fight without U.S. assistance. A functioning Parliament could provide a release valve for rising sectarian tensions, but the fact is both disaffected Sunnis and Shi'ites are still using the threat of violence to gain political leverage. It is wrong to assume that each new step toward democracy, however laudable, will persuade jihadists to lay down their arms; those who disdain Western-style democracy aren...
...Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, desperate for the creation of a "national unity" government that includes representatives of all the ethnic and sectarian groups, has declared Maliki's 37-member cabinet a giant leap forward. "With the political change that has taken place, with the emphasis on unity and reconciliation, with effective ministers, with associated activities, conditions are likely to move in the right direction and that would allow adjustments in terms of the size composition and mission of our forces," Khalilzad said. Expect that sentiment to be echoed by Bush Administration officials in Washington, where political progress is regarded as essential...