What's Happening In Baghdad

The vaunted Iraqi security plan that is taking place is not even managing to find any Iraqis:

Thousands of U.S. troops swept house-to-house through mostly Shiite areas virtually unopposed Wednesday in the opening phase of the long-awaited Baghdad security crackdown. But four U.S. soldiers were killed outside of the capital in an area not covered by the operation.

The U.S. military said 14 suspects were detained and four weapons caches discovered during the day's operation — seemingly a low tally. But U.S. officials say they are more concerned about establishing a long-term presence in the areas so that the public will gain confidence in security forces to protect them.

Outside the capital, fighting continued.

The military said four U.S. soldiers were killed Wednesday in an explosion in Diyala province, among six new U.S. deaths announced by the military. U.S. officers have expressed concern that insurgents and militias are leaving Baghdad to transfer the fight to Diyala and other provinces that border the capital.

Iraq's Sunni vice president, Tariq al-Hashemi, warned that advance publicity on the security operation had given Shiite militias time to flee the city for bases elsewhere in the country.

"I have information that numerous of their leaders are now in Basra and other southern provinces in safe havens," he told Al-Arabiya television. "I believe that those who were behind the bloodshed and the chaos should be pursued and criminals must face justice."

I believe they call that "Whack-A-Mole," and it was inevitable regardless of a super-duper secret surge or one publicized with billboards. It's happened every time the US has tried to assert themselves in any part of the country. Even al-Sadr has gone under (though I don't believe he's in Iran, I think that's just a pretext to give another reason to attack), only to emerge again at some later date or in some other place. But this crackdown mandated by the Iraqi government, which involves "reverse ethnic cleansing," taking Iraqis out of homes where they are not authorized and extending the curfew, will be hard to sustain. It's essentially martial law:

It is impossible to know exactly how many people have been forced from their homes, but estimates by Iraqi and American officials range from tens of thousands to as high as 200,000.

Samantha Power, a public policy professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government who has written widely on genocide, described the plan as either a public relations ploy that would never be enforced, or worse, a prelude to more sectarian cleansing and catastrophe.

“To do this in the middle of a war when tempers have been inflamed and militarization is ubiquitous seems to be putting the cart before the horse,” she said. “You haven’t stopped the willingness to ethnically cleanse, but you’re imposing the moral hazard of ethnic cleansing on the cleansee? Unless you create security first, you are paving the way for a potential massacre of returnees.”

There's more here. I don't see how this is anything other than a slow-motion massacre. Mercenary contractors are involved in the operation as well, clearing out homes and essentially emptying the capital. That's one way to stop the violence there, but at what cost? These sound like roving death squads which will shoot on sight. If one of the thousands of roving child beggars are found in a house where they shouldn't be, what are the rules of engagement? Must orphans leave the city and figure out their own way to survive?

According to the NGO Coordination Committee in Iraq (NCCI), the deteriorating economic situation in Iraq is the main reason for the increase in the number of street children since the occupation of the country began in 2003. The next major contributor is the increase in the number of widows countrywide.

"The economic situation of the Iraqis is decreasing month after month. Lots of families are using their children to get additional income, which they can get through begging. There are also families who send their children to work," Cedric Turlan, information officer for the NCCI, said.

The Bush Administration has been shamed into accepting more Iraqi refugees. But 7,000 is still a paltry sum, considering that this new crackdown will create on the order of a couple hundred thousand.

An empty shell of a capital is not a secure capital. It's just a series of bombed-out buildings. It does nothing to protect citizens in a civil war. It denies them shelter, actually.

How is this making anything safer?