"Don't Forget About Iraq"
It's the first day of another month: pay day for Iraqi police and soldiers. In an upscale part of Baghdad, officers file into a bank to collect cash to pay their men. It's not a lot of money for men taking a lot of risk. A car bomb suddenly explodes. At least 14 people are killed. But news of the attack barely registers in many of America's news outlets.Just yesterday, in broad daylight, a convoy of 11 SUVs pulled into the same part of Baghdad. They should have been a hard group to miss, especially when out poured gunmen wearing military fatigues. They burst into two street-level companies, kidnapping 26 employees and customers. Poof — everyone gone, the hunters and the hunted, in a mass-kidnap that's about as brazen as it gets. And this was the same neighborhood where last week, a rocket barrage followed by a car bomb had killed 31 people. Again, few Americans heard about any of it, because by and large, the news was under-reported.
Why? Partly, it's because there's a growing sense of "Iraq fatigue." To many American looking on, the daily drumbeat of death and despair has a certain sameness. It seems numbing after awhile. And all this has been going on for more than three years now, with no clear end in sight.