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Looking bleak for our troops and for Iraq!
Can the Iraq 'Surge' Be Salvaged? As Violence Seems to Outpace Progress, Officials Talk of Next Steps By GREG JAFFE and YOCHI J. DREAZEN
WASHINGTON -- When the Bush administration decided to send tens of thousands of additional troops to Iraq, the strategy rested on an unspoken trade-off: U.S. troops would risk greater casualties to tamp down violence and buy the Baghdad government time to make the political compromises needed to reconcile the country's warring factions.
But a resurgence of sectarian violence and attacks on U.S. troops, coupled with little to no progress on crucial Iraqi political goals, is already spurring discussion about whether the current strategy can succeed.
In the near term, senior American military officials in Baghdad are wrestling with how to increase the effectiveness of the "surge" strategy between now and September, when Gen. David Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, is supposed to give Washington a progress report. U.S. officials here and in Baghdad are also waging a parallel debate over how long the "surge" should last -- and whether the U.S. needs to begin planning for an alternative approach that would scale back both U.S. troop levels and American ambitions in Iraq.
With about 120 U.S. fatalities, May has been the deadliest month for U.S. troops since the fight for Fallujah in April 2004. The problems facing the surge have been compounded by the recent re-emergence of Moqtada al-Sadr, a Shiite Muslim cleric whose heavily armed militia has waged an on-again, off-again guerilla war against U.S. and British forces for almost four years. His Mahdi Army has also been linked to the wide-scale abductions and killings of young Sunni Muslim men.............
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