Word: sunni
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...three weeks of September alone, more than 500 Iraqis and some 59 U.S. troops have been killed, and the UN has made clear that it could not certify that a "credible" election could be held under these circumstances. That leaves the U.S. to either launch an offensive to retake Sunni towns form the insurgents in the brief window of opportunity between the U.S. election and the scheduled Iraqi one - and risk a backlash that could imperil the prospects of political survival for the government it has appointed - or else delay the election or allow it to proceed on flawed lines...
...angry guerrilla insurgency that the Bush Administration acknowledged last week is out of hand. Important parts of the country, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard Myers said, are controlled by rebels. Principal cities and major roads west and north of the capital are ruled by Sunni insurgents. Al-Sadr's men launch uprisings at will across the wide Shi'ite belt, and even parts of Baghdad are no-go zones for U.S. troops and the frail forces of the interim Iraqi government. All this has helped make the peace much bloodier than the war: last month anti...
...point on the President's claim that we are fighting a global war against terrorism. At the same time, though, the U.S. military acknowledged the sobering fact that there were now "no-go" zones in Iraq, areas the U.S. had ceded to the terrorists--much of the so-called Sunni triangle, for example--which put a question mark on the President's claim that he was aggressively fighting that war. At the end of all that, the President's post-convention bounce had settled into a solid lead...
...everything. Leave aside the fact that most Americans would willingly have spent the money--and, more to the point, the lives--if the policy had actually made us safer. A much stronger argument was available, given the recent events in Iraq: Bush has chosen not to fight in the Sunni triangle, and the war cannot be won until he does. "You can't allow the enemy to have sanctuaries and expect to win," John McCain told me. "You have to go in and dig them...
...Sadrists on board is a second major challenge ahead of elections. Their capacity to disrupt order in Baghdad and throughout the Shiite south is by now well-established, although as a popular Shiite movement they have a lot more to gain from participating in elections than do the Sunni insurgents. (Shiites make up more than 60 percent of the population, whereas Sunni Arabs comprise less than 20 percent.) Sadr's game is not necessarily to prevent elections, but to ensure that, at some point, his party wins the lion's share of the Shiite vote...