Car bomb kills dozens in Kirkuk Market on heels of US Withdrawal

BAGHDAD – Not a single American soldier was in sight. Gone, too, were the American helicopters whose buzz has for years defined Baghdad's background track.

Left alone to protect the capital today were thousands of Iraqi troops and police manning checkpoints, with army tanks deployed at potential trouble spots and convoys of pickup trucks with machine-guns roaming the streets.

But it was elsewhere, 290 kilometres to the north, that militants delivered their first deadly challenge to Iraq's security forces on a highly symbolic day after the formal withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from cities at midnight.

A car bombing devastated a food market in the city of Kirkuk, killing at least 33 people and wounding 90. The early evening attack, which bore the hallmarks of Sunni extremist groups like al-Qaida in Iraq, was the second in the Kirkuk area since a truck bombing killed 82 people on June 20.

That car bomb in Kirkuk reminds us that this may all be wishful thinking a hemisphere removed from the truth.

After all, Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. No, he didn't. Iraqis would welcome their American liberators. No, they didn't. Iraq is ungovernable and should be split in three. No, it isn't, and not necessarily. The surge will never work. Yes, it did. The future of Iraq can be foreseen. No, it can't.

But in the United States, reasonable Democrats and Republicans agree that the current policy on Iraq is the correct policy, that troops should increasingly focus on training Iraqi security forces to take over the job, and that the mission should end in 2011, leaving a small residual force for as long as the Iraqis want it there. This is called bipartisan consensus.