Oops--Our Bad


Stuff Happens:

The U.S. military said Monday it accidentally killed nine Iraqi civilians during an operation targeting al-Qaida in Iraq--the deadliest known case of mistaken identity in recent months.

Meanwhile, Patrick Cockburn provides some perspective on the "success" in Iraq:

Iraq is less violent than a year ago, but the country is still the most dangerous in the world...

For all President George Bush's claims of progress, cited in his final State of the Union address last week, Baghdad looks like a city out of the Middle Ages, divided into hostile townships. Districts have been turned into fortresses, encircled by walls made out of concrete slabs. Police and soldiers check all identities at the entrances and exits.

"People say things are better than they were," says Zainab Jafar, a well-educated Shia woman, "but what they mean is that they are better than the bloodbath of 2006. The situation is still terrible."

There are checkpoints everywhere. I counted 27 on the road from central Baghdad to Fallujah, 30 miles west of the capital. These guard posts provide protection, but they are also a threat because there are so many of them that it is easy for kidnappers, criminals and militiamen to set up their own checkpoints in order to select likely victims.

Cockburn also confirms what I'd suspected about our newfound Sunni allies:

Asked what he was doing immediately before becoming chief of police, Colonel Feisal replies engagingly: "I was fighting against the Americans." He volunteers that the worst day of his life was when Saddam Hussein was overthrown in 2003.

This is a very different picture of Iraq from the one President Bush gave to Congress in his State of the Union address, just after I left Fallujah. He claimed that "more than 80,000 Iraqi citizens ... are fighting terrorism", but did not mention that most of them are the "terrorists" of yesterday who have switched sides.