With only two months left for a crucial reassessment of its strategy on Iraq, the Bush administration has no major deal to its credit, writes Salah Hemeid It was early Saturday morning as shoppers gathered in Amarli, a little town north of Baghdad, when a massive truck bombing ripped through the crowded market, burying dozens in the rubble of shops and mud houses. The explosion, which was among the deadliest since the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, killed and wounded some 500 persons in the mostly Shia-Turkoman dominated town.Across Iraq, attacks continued throughout the week, shattering a relative lull in violence and raising questions about whether insurgents who have fled an ongoing military offensive in Baghdad and other surrounding towns are regrouping and attacking soft targets elsewhere, in less-secure areas with fewer troops.Amid the new violence, the US military reported Saturday that eight American soldiers were killed in two days, all in combat or following roadside bombs in Baghdad and the western province of Anbar. The deaths brought the US death toll in Iraq to 3,605, underscoring the mounting death toll from the five-month security offensive, reinforced by thousands of US troops. The US military said Sunni extremists were fleeing the three-week-old US offensive centred in Diyala, a province which is 90 kilometres to the east of Baghdad, and other areas around the capital. The highly publicised sweep aims to uproot Al-Qaeda militants and Sunni insurgents using the area to stage car bomb attacks in the capital. US military commanders claimed that many insurgents had fled these areas just before the offensive began. The back-to-back attacks underscored the reality US military commanders face: even as thousands of troops were dispatched to Baghdad and Diyala, they are insufficient to secure the whole country, leaving wide swathes of vulnerable targets. While the capital has seen a drop in major suicide bombings in the past few weeks, lower-level violence has persisted. Following the Amarli attack a surge of bloodshed in the capital last week left hundreds of Iraqis either killed in bombings, shootings or kidnap-slayings. The surge in violence prompted prominent Shia and Sunni politicians to call on Iraqi civilians to take up arms to defend themselves. These calls reflect the growing frustration with the inability of Iraqi security forces to prevent extremist attacks -- such as Saturday's devastating suicide truck bombing in Amarli. It also raised questions about Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki's efforts to stabilise the country. Washington has been pressing the embattled premier to pass measures to encourage Sunni Arabs to cease supporting the insurgency and to start supporting the government. By Sunday, the administration must submit an interim report on the progress made towards a series of benchmarks, or political and security goals that were set for Al-Maliki when Bush decided to increase US troop levels in Iraq in January. US officials expect the report will conclude that Al-Maliki's government has not met any of its targets for political, economic and other reforms, thereby speeding up the Bush administration's reckoning on what to do next. Furthermore, last week Al-Maliki found himself enmeshed in another battle, this time with firebrand Shia cleric Muqtada Sadr and his followers in the Al-Mahdi Army. The Iraqi army fought the unruly Shia militia in several towns following new power struggles in the mainly Shia-dominated southern and central Iraq. If this continues, the fighting could threaten the Shia alliance and might even lead to the collapse of Al-Maliki's coalition government. On Saturday, Al-Maliki issued a bluntly worded statement calling on Sadr's Mahdi Army to put aside its weapons and further alleged that the movement had been infiltrated by supporters of Saddam Hussein's ousted regime. Al-Sadr's aides reacted with fury, and some suggested the statement had been designed to pave the way for a crackdown on their populist Shia movement, which fields one of Iraq's largest armed militias. Sadr still enjoys widespread support among central and southern Iraq's Shia communities and Al-Maliki might have miscalculated by alienating the biggest Shia bloc which helped bring him to power. With some Sunni parliamentarians suggesting a vote of no-confidence in Al-Maliki on 15 July, the days of his government might be numbered. Al-Maliki's failure and the soaring violence has rekindled the debate in Washington over the administration's war policy. On Monday as lawmakers returned from their weeklong 4 July break, the Senate began discussing a major military spending bill, the National Defence Authorisation Act. Democrats -- and a growing number of Republicans plan to use the debate as an opportunity to challenge the Bush administration's Iraq policy. Bush is under growing pressure even within his own Republican party to shift course in Iraq as the war drags on and casualties climb. Yet, the White House has made it clear that Bush is not contemplating withdrawing US forces from Iraq for now despite an erosion of support among Republicans for his war policy. The administration also tried to lower expectations about a report due on Sunday on whether the Iraqi government is meeting political, economic and security benchmarks which Bush set in January when he announced a build-up of 21,500 US combat forces. White House press secretary Tony Snow said all of the additional troops had just been placed and it would be unrealistic to expect major progress now. As debate over war policy intensifies in the White House and Congress, Iraq's Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari warned Monday that the country may fracture into separate parts and its government could collapse if the United States began withdrawing troops too quickly. "In our estimation, until Iraqi forces are ready, there is a responsibility on the United States to stand with the Iraqi government as the forces are being established," Zebari said. But some influential Americans seem lukewarm about Iraq's split if that could save Washington from further entrenching its problems in Iraq. Some of these Americans have again floated the idea of partitioning Iraq as an exit strategy arguing that the country appears to be drawing more and more into a fully fledged civil war. Two American scholars, Michael O'Hanlon, a Brookings Institute senior fellow, and Edward Joseph, a visiting scholar suggested the partition as an alternative plan for stabilising the war-torn country. In a report released by the Saban Centre for Middle East Policy, the authors called for breaking up the country into three separate entities, claiming the partition could allow the United States and its partners to preserve their "core strategic goals." What the two scholars propose is to build two more autonomous regions, along the lines of the existing Kurdish autonomy region in the northern part of the country; one for Sunni Arabs and one for the Muslim Shia. The report suggests that Iraq could become a federation, or a confederation, loosely governed from Baghdad where the central authority would oversee issues such as national defence and the fair sharing of oil resources among all three regions, leaving local governments to run the rest.
