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Saturday, March 31, 2007

Responsibility

The risk we are taking by seeming to take over security duties in Shia neighborhoods from militias was on display with heavy Shia losses to Sunni car bombs:


The radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr issued a scathing attack on the United States on Friday, following one of the country's bloodiest days, blaming Washington for Iraq's troubles and calling for a mass demonstration April 9 — the fourth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad.

As al-Sadr's remarks were read in a mosque, Shiites in Baghdad loaded wooden coffins into vans and shoveled broken glass and other debris into wheelbarrows in the aftermath of a double suicide bombing at a marketplace. At least 181 people were killed or found dead Thursday as Sunni insurgents apparently stepped up their campaign of bombings to derail the seven-week-old security sweep in Baghdad.

This is the risk of making us responsible for every blast. We need to pull in the non-death squad Shia militias and put part of the responsibility on them, as local defense forces, for securing Shia neighborhoods.

Despite initial success in reducing violence, I remain very troubled by this metric in judging the success of the surge.