reality-based educator

The weekend in Iraq:

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- A suicide bomber struck Sunday outside a college campus in Baghdad, killing at least 38 people and injuring dozens as a string of other blasts and rocket attacks left bloodshed around the city.

Most of the victims were students at the college, a business studies annex of Mustansiriyah University that was hit by a series of deadly explosions last month. At least 44 people were injured in Sunday's blast.

...

Earlier, two Katyusha rockets hit a Shiite enclave in southern Baghdad, killing at least 10, and a bomb near the fortified Green Zone claimed two lives, police said.

The Green Zone houses the U.S. and British embassies and key Iraqi government offices. The blast was about 100 meters yards from the Iranian Embassy, but authorities did not believe it was targeting the compound.

A separate car bombing in a Shiite district in central Baghdad killed at least one person and injured four, police said.

...

Iraq's interior ministry, meanwhile, raised the toll from a suicide truck bombing in the violence-wracked Anbar province on Saturday to 52 dead and 74 injured.

The attack on worshippers leaving a mosque in Habbaniyah, about 50 miles west of Baghdad, was believed linked to escalating internal Sunni battles between insurgents and those who oppose them.

These attacks came a day after Prime Minister Maliki praised the progress of Operation Imposing law - the name for the joint U.S./Iraqi security crackdown - and said ''There is no safe shelter for all outlaws."

Except there is safe shelter for outlaws. Plenty of it, actually. While the U.S. military and the Iraqis security forces are trying to stop the violence in Baghdad with extra manpower and patrols, the outlaws have fled the capital for nearby Diyala Province. Here's the AP on that trend:

But the crackdown also has sent Sunni insurgents fleeing the city to the nearby province of Diyala, which has emerged as a new and busy front for U.S. troops.

It has become so volatile that the Pentagon may delay plans to turn over control of Diyala to the Iraqi military by the end of the year, Maj. Gen. Benjamin Mixon told The Associated Press.

''The potential is there'' to hand over Iraq's other 17 provinces ''except in Diyala, where the future remains in question,'' said Mixon, commander of U.S. forces in northern Iraq, which includes Diyala.

Diyala, northwest of Baghdad, is known as ''Little Iraq'' because of its near-equal mix of Sunni and Shiite Arabs as well as Kurds -- the country's three major groups. Al-Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian, was killed in a U.S. airstrike in Diyala last year. Sunni extremists claim Diyala's capital, Baqouba, as the seat of an Islamic state in Iraq.

Direct fire attacks on U.S. soldiers are up 70 percent in Diyala since last summer, and fierce battles have raged since the Baghdad security plan was launched.

Proponents of the surge/supporters of the war like Senator Lieberman and many in the Grand Old Party keep saying this is a last ditch effort to get control of security in Iraq and it must be given a chance to succeed before we declare it a failure.

But how long do we have to give it? Newsweek said the Petraeus Plan calls for counterinsurgency measures for 5-10 years. Is that how long we have to give the surge before we declare it a failure?

Because two weeks into the surge, I see no decrease in violence. Instead I see a movement of violence - Baghdad gets quieter while other places in Iraq get more violent. Iraq as a whole gets quiet for a few days, then explodes in horrific violence.

Frankly, that's been the pattern for previous security crackdowns as well.

Maybe (and it's a big "maybe") if the U.S. had 300,000-400,000 to throw into Iraq for 5-10 years, the Petraeus Plan would work. But as currently devised, the Petraeus Plan has no chance to succeed and all we are doing is playing a political game of make-believe to save the political asses of war supporters and the preznut and VP.