Iraq's Truth Bursts At The Seams

A country may be credibly thought to be still at war when it can't hold a mass gathering without dozens of deaths.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Four female suicide bombers and a gunman killed at least 70 people and wounded almost 300 others during a string of attacks in central Baghdad and Kirkuk on Monday, officials said.

In Baghdad, three suicide bombers detonated their explosives in three locations within 30 minutes of each other. The attacks killed at least 32 people and wounded 102 others, most of them Shiite pilgrims, an Interior Ministry official said.

It was the second day attackers have targeted Shiite pilgrims taking part in an annual march to one of the Shiites' holiest shrines.

On Sunday afternoon, seven pilgrims were gunned down in a town south of Baghdad.

About 150 miles north of the capital, another suicide bomber ran into a crowd of protesters at a Kurdish political rally, a police official said. After she detonated the explosives she was carrying, gunmen began firing into the crowd from different directions, the official said.

Every time there's a pilgrimage, security cannot be maintained. And yet, in this country discussion is shut down, because the surge has unquestionably worked. That's not what you hear from folks like the former Iraqi Prime Minister:

In a briefing before members of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs yesterday, (Iyad) Allawi answered questions from members of he subcommittee on international organizations, human rights, and oversight. When asked by Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), the subcommittee's ranking member, for Allawi's "assessment of of what's come of the surge," Allawi all but said, not much.

Reminding Rohrabacher that the original objective of the surge was to create a safe environment for a process of national reconciliation, Allawi said, "Now, militarily, the surge has achieved some of its goals. Politically, I don't think so."

Allawi rattled off a laundry list of perils that still confront the Iraqi people: internal displacement of large numbers of people, millions of refugees outside Iraq, security forces he described as sectarian militias dressed in national uniforms, no enforcement of the national constitution, which he described as a "divisive" document.

It's pathetic that only an Iraqi can speak the truth, that the surge hasn't worked at accomplishing its stated goals, and the challenges that the Iraqis still face are immense. But of course, the costs of war have been hidden, both in treasure and in human lives. So the outcomes of the surge have been hidden as well. The entire war has been stage-managed, and yet Americans STILL have turned against it (thanks in no small part to the power of alternative media). There needs to be a sustained effort to get at the continued truth of what's happening in Iraq, instead of making political ploys based on shared assumptions.