One Of Those Safe Streets

Maybe Sen. McCain will tell us what street this was on:

Bombers launched two deadly strikes Thursday in crowded Shiite marketplaces in Baghdad and a town north of Iraq's capital -- killing 90 people and wounding dozens. At least 15 others died in other bombings around the country.

The attacks erupted as Iraqi shoppers filled marketplaces Thursday to buy goods at the start of the weekend and the eve of the Muslim holy day of Friday.

In the deadliest attack, at least one suicide bomber wearing an explosive vest detonated in a crowded open-air marketplace in Baghdad's Shiite district of Shaab. At least 60 people were killed, and 41 others were injured.

"It was a very, very crowded market. All those killed are innocent," a man who was wounded in the explosion told Reuters news agency.

"I saw heads separated from the bodies and legs blown off," Wissam Hashim Ali, 27, told Reuters from the hospital.

You can add to this the fact that Green Zone attacks have increased, with rocket attacks occurring 6 out of the past 7 days. The Green Zone is probably the most secure area in the entire country, and yet a US soldier died from one of these rocket attacks this week. Plus you have the gruesome situation in Tal Afar, where tit-for-tat revenge killings were carried out by Iraqi police who we trained in the first place. And in the scariest story I read today, it appears that Muqtada al-Sadr is losing his grip on his militia.

Iraq's most powerful Shiite militia is increasingly splintering as radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr -- now believed to be in Iran -- faces fresh challenges to his leadership, according to senior Pentagon and administration officials.

In the near term, the deepening divides in Sadr's movement have contributed to a lull in fighting that is benefiting U.S. and Iraqi operations to secure Baghdad, where Shiite militia and death squads fomenting sectarian violence are considered the greatest threat to Iraq's stability, the officials said.

Yet the group's fracturing in the long run could make it harder to defeat militarily and could also complicate political reconciliation, they said.

"It's much more difficult to go after small, violent splinter groups than if you can get one organization to come in from the cold and reconcile," said a senior Pentagon official. "You have to fight with more people and kill more people, and it's much harder to bring them over to our side. The bright side is that, at least for the near term, they are keeping kind of quiet."

That's a dim bright side.

I'm not convinced Sadr's in Iran, but clearly he's been losing control of his militia for some time. And it's far easier to negotiate a political solution with an individual actor than it is a chaotic and diverse group of what amounts to warlords, each with oppositional interests.

It's OK though because we're making great progress and Gen. Petraeus can walk the streets in a thong and umbrella doing his "Singin' in the Rain" impersonation, right Sen. McCain?