Wednesday: 285 Iraqis, 1 GI Killed; 295 Iraqis Wounded

Eye on Iraq: Black Wednesday in Baghdad
Published: April 19, 2007 at 10:26 AM	E-mail Story | Print Preview | License

By MARTIN SIEFF
UPI Senior News Analyst
WASHINGTON April 19 (UPI) -- The first thing to say about the horrific events in Baghdad Wednesday is that a single day's mayhem, no matter how horrific, does not decide the outcome of a war.

The U.S. troop buildup in Iraq
is not completed and will not be so until at least the end of next
month. Wars are bloody, tragic, messy and above all unpredictable. The
finest security forces and counter-insurgency troops in the world have
their bad or unlucky days.

Having said that, however, the implications of
Wednesday's four bombings that killed at least 183 people are
depressing and sobering.

First, this was clearly not simply a case of the bombers "getting lucky."

Unlike the al-Qaida terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001,
which Osama bin Laden's followers have been thankfully unable to
duplicate over the past five and a half years, the success of the Sunni
insurgents' Wednesday bombings in Baghdad was part of a consistent and
escalating pattern.

As we have monitored in previous Eye on Iraq columns
over the past two months, Gen. David Petraeus' "islands" or "ink-blots"
of stability strategy in the Iraqi capital of 6 million people has
already proved highly effective in deterring the main Sunni and Shiite
militias from continuing their previous wild sprees of random and
retaliatory killings. But it has failed to reduce the level of
multiple-fatality bombings by car or truck bomb and by suicide bombers.

Those MFB attacks have been steadily escalating in
terms of the numbers of casualties inflicted. Wednesday's attacks were
more numerous and bloody than previous ones, but they were simply a
further extension of an already successful strategy.

The worst of the four attacks took place in the
Sadriyah market, where 127 people were killed and another 148 wounded.
It was only two and a half months since an earlier attack at the same
market killed 137 people.

Second, it is quite clear that four years after U.S.
forces first entered Baghdad, U.S. military intelligence and the CIA
have failed to achieve widespread penetration of the Sunni terror
bombing rings.

One of the reasons why the Viet Cong gambled so
heavily on their daring but immensely costly Tet offensive in Vietnam
in 1968 was that they were reeling from the success of the CIA's
Phoenix counter-insurgency program. Tet was a double-or-nothing gamble
to reverse the tide. Although it failed militarily, it achieved its
political and strategic goals through its impact on the American public
and the U.S. leadership of the time.

But so far, U.S. forces in Iraq, still hobbled by a
lack of Arabic speakers and military analysts familiar with the
complexities of Iraqi political culture and history, have been unable
to make any inroads into the Sunni terror bomb groups comparable to
those of the Phoenix program against the Viet Cong.

There have certainly been many operational successes,
many due to the fast-reacting tactical excellence of U.S. forces on the
ground. But the number of bombings against Shiite civilian targets and
the numbers of casualties inflicted by them has been steadily and
rapidly rising.

Further, Wednesday's attacks showed a degree of
coordination and planning in excess of anything the insurgents had
previously managed since the start of the "surge." That leaves open the
even more disquieting possibility that Black Wednesday may not prove to
be an aberration or a lucky "hole in one" for the insurgents. Instead,
it could mark their ability to metastasize their bombing campaign in
Baghdad to a new level of scale and intensity.

It should also be noted that the bombings took place only a few days after Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's
already ineffectual government was further weakened by the resignation
of six Cabinet ministers loyal to the political faction of Moqtada Sadr
and his Mahdi Army. The latest attacks were clearly intended to further
undermine Maliki's credibility among the Shiite community by displaying
his continued inability to protect them.

In these columns, we have repeatedly expressed our
skepticism that the "surge" strategy could work because the U.S. forces
involved were too few to establish control of a city the size of
Baghdad, because the Iraqi security forces remain ineffectual and
because Maliki's administration remains a government in name only. To
all this should be added the continued failure of the U.S. forces in
Iraq to effectively penetrate the Sunni insurgent organizations.
Unfortunately, Wednesday's bombings appear to confirm these concerns.
Nine weeks into the "surge," Baghdad is more violent and chaotic than
ever.