U.S.: Iraq Crackdown Builds Confidence
Despite last month's death toll in Iraq, U.S. military leaders Thursday expressed confidence in their latest security operation, highlighted by the arrival of nearly 12,000 U.S. and Iraqi troops in Baghdad.
"I think that there's been great progress in the security front here recently in Baghdad," Gen. John Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, said after meeting with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani.
Many terrorists slipped through a U.S.-led sweep three weeks ago and remain a threat, CBS News correspondent Mark Strassmann reports, but in one west Baghdad neighborhood, killings have plummeted 85 percent.
Since the security crackdown began in Baghdad, the murder rate citywide is down 41 percent. It's progress — but it's been less than three weeks, Strassmann reports.
Political and sectarian violence across Iraq spiked after the Feb. 22 bombing of a Shiite mosque in the town of Samarra, north of Baghdad. The bloodshed claimed 3,500 lives last month (including 1,500 in Baghdad), making July the deadliest month since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 — and stoking fears of a civil war.
With one week remaining in August, the estimated number of Iraqis killed around the country was at least 605, according to an AP count. That number was about 60 percent of the estimated AP total of at 1east 1,015 killed for all of July.
Sunni Arab insurgents have been regularly attacking U.S. and Iraqi troops, mostly in the Baghdad area and in the province of Anbar to its west.
Abizaid said he and Army Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, were "very optimistic that the situation will stabilize."
He said comments he had made previously regarding the possibility of Iraq sliding into civil war had been misinterpreted.
"I believe there is a danger of civil war in Iraq, but only a danger. I think Iraq's far from it," Abizaid said.
Referring to the violence in Baghdad, Casey said: "I think everybody has seen an improvement in the situation in Baghdad over the last weeks because of the operations of the Iraqi security forces supported by the American Army."
In a column in the Wall Street Journal published Wednesday, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad wrote that "the Battle of Baghdad will determine the future of Iraq, which will itself go a long way to determining the future of the world's most vital region."
In other developments in Iraq:
While the U.S. military praised its efforts abroad, at home a prominent Democratic lawmaker has renewed his call to keep Iraq together by giving greater autonomy to Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds.
Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., also criticized the Bush administration for having no coherent strategy for success in Iraq, other than preventing a U.S. defeat and turning the problem over to its successors in 2009.
Writing in The Washington Post, Biden said, "The new central reality in Iraq is that violence between Shiites and Sunnis has surpassed the insurgency and the foreign terrorists as the main security threat."
He said massive unemployment feeds the ranks of sectarian militias and criminal gangs.
"No amount of troops can solve this problem," he said. "The only way to hold Iraq together and create the conditions for our armed forces to responsibly withdraw is to give Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds incentives to pursue their interests peacefully and to forge a sustainable political settlement."
To maintain a unified Iraq, Biden proposed decentralizing it and giving Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds their own regions, as was done when Bosnia was divided into ethnic federations. The central government would be left in charge of common interests such as border security and the distribution of oil revenue.
The plan "would bind the Sunnis to the deal by guaranteeing them a proportionate share of oil revenue," Biden said. "Each group would have an incentive to maximize oil production, making oil the glue that binds the country together."
He said the plan was consistent with Iraq's constitution, which already provides for the country's 18 provinces to join together in regions, with their own security forces and control over day-to-day issues.
Baghdad, the capital, would be maintained as a federal city, belonging to no one region. "This plan is the only idea on the table for dealing with the militias, which are likely to retreat to their respective regions instead of engaging in acts of violence."
Biden said it is not partition — "in fact it may be the only way to prevent violent partition and preserve a unified Iraq."
He challenged those who reject his plan to come up with an alternative.
Biden, a potential presidential contender in 2008, is the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He has often traveled to Iraq.
He first made his proposal on Iraq four months ago along with Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations.