What a difference a year makes

At the annual Radio and Television Correspondents' Dinner, President Bush opened with a clever joke:

“A year ago, my approval rating was in the 30s, my nominee for the Supreme Court had just withdrawn, and my Vice President had shot someone. Ahhh, those were the good old days.” (Whitehouse)

How else have things changed over the course of a year:

March, 2006
Well, on 20 March 2006, President Bush spoke of the successes in Iraq that the media never covers. At his speech in Cleveland, Ohio he stated:

“Today I'd like to share a concrete example of progress in Iraq that most Americans do not see every day in their newspapers and on their television screens. I'm going to tell you the story of a northern Iraqi city called Tal Afar…See, if you're a resident of Tal Afar today, this is what you're going to see: You see your children going to school and playing safely in the streets…You see markets opening, and you hear the sound of construction equipment as buildings go up and homes are remade. In short, you see a city that is coming back to life.” (Whitehouse)

March, 2007
On March 28th, however, a truck bomb exploded in a Shiite neighborhood killing 83 people and wounding more than 185. The predominantly Shiite police force responded by systematically targeting Sunni homes. The police officers went “house to house in a Sunni neighborhood, dragged people into the street and shot them in the head.” All told, the retaliatory violence resulted in 70 people executed, 40 kidnapped and 30 wounded. Iraqi doctor, Salih Qaddaw, described the situation at his hospital:

“So many bloodied corpses were brought in on Tuesday night that the entry hall could not be kept clean,” he said. “If you would have a look inside the hospital yesterday, it would have looked as if it were painted red despite all our efforts to clean the entry. But the influx of casualties kept growing bigger.” (NYT)

If that was not enough to make your blood curdle (or after reading the entirety of Bush’s speech and visualizing the absolute horror Tel Afar citizens experience daily), more than 100 people were killed in Baghdad after a series of attacks, including two bombings at a busy street market (NYT). Absurdly, many conservatives and Iraqis consider this a positive step and a sign that the escalation is working because only 100 people, as opposed to 150 died on March 30.

Update: After writing this on Saturday March 31, Senator John McCain returned from Iraq touting the success of the escalation and the resulting increase in Baghdad security. Despite these proclamations, many more bombs exploded over the weekend (after the Tal Afar bombings, which were the deadliest of the war to this date), killing 50 and several US soldiers.

What struck me was the fact that McCain earlier last month said on CNN, “General Petraeus goes out there almost every day in an unarmed humvee.” Then, on the Bill Bennett readio program, he said that there “are neighborhoods in Baghdad where you and I could walk through those neighborhoods, today.” However, when he toured the city, McCain traveled in a convoy of armored military vehicles and was accompanied by a large contingent of heavily armed soldiers. He wore body armor while they shopped and other precautions, described shortly, were taken. Obviously, the streets are not quite as safe as they appear. (NYT)

Adding to the idiocy, he and his travelling partners described the Shorja market as a safe place to peddle wares. Representative Mike Pence, an Indiana Republican, went so far as to say the Shorja market was “like a normal outdoor market in Indiana.” In today's New York Times, several Iraqis said what I assume most Americans already believe: he was flat wrong. From the Times article:

“What are they talking about?” Ali Jassim Faiyad, the owner of an electrical appliances shop in the market, said Monday. “The security procedures were abnormal!”

The delegation arrived at the market, which is called Shorja, on Sunday with more than 100 soldiers in armored Humvees — the equivalent of an entire company — and attack helicopters circled overhead, a senior American military official in Baghdad said. The soldiers redirected traffic from the area and restricted access to the Americans, witnesses said, and sharpshooters were posted on the roofs. The congressmen wore bulletproof vests throughout their hourlong visit.

“They paralyzed the market when they came,” Mr. Faiyad said during an interview in his shop on Monday.

“This was only for the media.”He added, “This will not change anything.”

Making matters worse, at very the same market these men callously compared to an American market, at least 61 Iraqis were murdered and scores more wounded as the result of two vehicle bombs and a roadside bomb. More recently, “snipers hidden in Shorja’s bazaar have killed several people.” I have never been to a market, much less a mall where I feared for my life; and for these men to compare anything in Iraq to the US not only insults my intelligence, but also marginalizes the horrors the Iraqis have thus far endured. (NYT)