Summer of Goodbyes...
by Riverbend

Residents of Baghdad are systematically being pushed out of the city. Some families are waking up to find a Klashnikov bullet and a letter in an envelope with the words “Leave your area or else.” The culprits behind these attacks and threats are Sadr’s followers- Mahdi Army. It’s general knowledge, although no one dares say it out loud. In the last month we’ve had two different families staying with us in our house, after having to leave their neighborhoods due to death threats and attacks. It’s not just Sunnis- it’s Shia, Arabs, Kurds- most of the middle-class areas are being targeted by militias. Other areas are being overrun by armed Islamists. The Americans have absolutely no control in these areas. Or maybe they simply don’t want to control the areas because when there’s a clash between Sadr’s militia and another militia in a residential neighborhood, they surround the area and watch things happen. Since the beginning of July, the men in our area have been patrolling the streets. Some of them patrol the rooftops and others sit quietly by the homemade road blocks we have on the major roads leading into the area. You cannot in any way rely on Americans or the government. You can only hope your family and friends will remain alive- not safe, not secure- just alive. That’s good enough.

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Iraq: The pro-American order falling apart?
by Helena Cobban

The situation of the US military in Iraq seems to be deteriorating fairly fast. US military commanders have been trying to sell a narrative that Iraq is "on the brink of civil war"... I'm not sure if this is intended to justify the higher profile US forces have been adopting in Baghdad, to excuse their failure to bring security to the capital and the rest of the country, or to act as a sort of early excuse for an imminent pullout (okay, more realistically, a drawdown) of of the US troop presence from the country. A couple of things are very clear, though. One is that the US-conducted "rebuilding" of the Iraqi security forces as a single unified (and pro-US) body has failed miserably and another, that there have been numerous signs of heightened sectarian violence in and around Baghdad.

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Exclusive: Iraq—Plans in Case of a Civil War

The Bush administration insists Iraq is a long way from civil war, but the contingency planning has already begun inside the White House and the Pentagon. President Bush will move U.S. troops out of Iraq if the country descends into civil war, according to one senior Bush aide who declined to be named while talking about internal strategy. "If there's a full-blown civil war, the president isn't going to allow our forces to be caught in the crossfire," the aide said. "But institutionally, the government of Iraq isn't breaking down. It's still a unity government." Bush's position on a pullout of U.S. troops emerged in response to news-week's questions about Sen. John Warner, chairman of the Armed Services Committee. Warner warned last week that the president might require a new vote from Congress to allow troops to stay in Iraq in what he called "all-out civil war." But the senior Bush aide said the White House would need no prompting from Congress to get troops out "if the Iraqi government broke down completely along sectarian lines."

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