Aught Seven, Act One, Scene Six: The Middle East

In January, the Bush Administration announced plans to send another 20,000 U.S. troops to Iraq and named Army Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, an expert on counterinsurgency, as U.S. commander of troops in Iraq. Petraeus (on the right in the photo at right) replaces Army General George Casey. Throughout the spring, Bush urges the country to get behind the Petraeus plan.

In February, British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced that he would bring home more than 1,600 of the 7,100 British troops in Iraq. In March, British troops pulled out of Basra; two days later, rival Shiite factions began battling over a government building that had been evacuated by the military. In April, the British government announced that it would no longer use the term "The War on Terror" to describe its foreign policy aims.

On the 4th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, icasualities.org estimated that 3,476 coalition troops and 62,474 Iraqis had died as a result of the war in Iraq. A year ago, the numbers were 2,536 coalition troops and 38,576 Iraqis. On average, then, according to this count 15,000 Iraqis have died each year since the start of the U.S. invasion in March of 2003, with almost 25,000 dying over the last year (an average of 68 per day). (Meanwhile, between 50,000 and 100,000 are dying each year in Darfur).

But the casualty count in Iraq may, in fact, be more than ten times as high as the estimates of icasualties.org. As was mentioned in this blog in December, according to an article published in the Lancet more than six months ago, "Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey", a study done by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health estimated that between March 2003 and July 2006, 655,000 Iraqis (2.5% of the population) or 540 per day died above the number that would be expected in a non-conflict situation. On April 18th, The United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq criticised Baghdad for concealing casualty figures.

The men in the AP photo at left, which was taken a week ago today, are mourning relatives who were victims of a car bomb that exploded the previous day in the Shiite holy city of Karbala when the streets were packed with people heading for evening prayers. The bomb killed 58 and wounded scores more near some of the country's most sacred shrines.

In March, the United Nations reported that 2 million Iraqis, including the judge who sentenced Saddam Hussein to death, have fled their country since the war began. Iraqi refugees were flooding Syria and Jordan, where they now account for 5 and 12 percent of those countries' total populations. According to the State Department, by late March, the United States had accepted 500 of those refugees. The Bush Administration agreed to reverse its policy of the last several years and discuss stabilizing Iraq with high-level diplomats from Syria and Iran.

In April, former CIA Director George Tenet published a book accusing the Bush Administration of taking his phrase “slam dunk”—referring to intelligence that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction—out of context in order to justify a war that the president, the vice president, and the secretary of defense had resolved to wage before September 11, 2001.

On April 19th, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid declared that the United States has lost the war in Iraq.

The day before Reid's announcement, a senior U.N. inspector revealed that in the past two months Iran has doubled its capacity to enrich uranium.