Baghdad bombs kill 160 in war's worst sectarian attack

How long before even Bush and Blair are forced to call this civil war?

Yesterday, we witnessed the worst sectarian violence in Iraq since the US invasion with over 160 people killed and at least 257 injured.

In a day of strife extreme even by the bloody standards of the country, Sunni insurgents carried out a concerted attack with suicide bombings and mortar rounds on Sadr City, a large Shia slum on the outskirts of the capital which is also the stronghold of the radical cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr. Scores of people were killed by the blasts as panicked residents fled screaming from the streets.

The response was immediate and lethal, with Shia fighters launching a dozen mortar rounds and rockets into the Sunni district of Adhamiya, targeting in particular the Abu Hanifa mosque, the holiest Sunni shrine in Baghdad.

Further outbreaks of fighting erupted between the two communities in the north west of the city, where Sunni gunmen attacked the Shia-controlled health ministry. American helicopter gunships and Iraqi army units were called in during the three-hour firefight, which left an unspecified number dead and wounded.

With internecine killings increasing across the country, yesterday's deaths were a severe blow not only to any hopes of an accommodation between the two communities, but also to the exit strategy being desperately sought from a state in anarchy by the US and Britain.

Bush and Blair increasingly sound out of touch with what is actually happening on the ground in Iraq, choosing instead to express their insane optimism rather than to acknowledge what is actually taking place here.

Were these incidents taking place anywhere else on Earth, we would not be debating what we are watching.

On the face of it, a statement from the leaders of all Iraq's different sects seems like a good thing:

Further calls for calm and self-restraint came from leaders of the Shia, Sunni and Kurdish communities.

"We call on people to act responsibly and to stand together to calm the situation. We call for a revision of the government's existing security plans for Baghdad to better protect innocent civilians," Tareq al-Hashemi, the Vice-President and a Sunni, and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the party leader and a Shia, said in the joint statement on national television, accompanied by the Iraqi President, a Kurd, Jalal Talabani.

The problem here is that the longer the coalition troops remain in the country, the less independent the Iraqi government appears and the less likely the fighting factions are to listen to calls for calm.

American and British presence in Iraq is fuelling the insurgency. And yet, if they leave, the country is likely to fall into a period of even greater violence.

There is no way one can overestimate the size of the nightmare that Bush and Blair have created in this country. Those calling for easy solutions are avoiding just how mindboggingly incompetent these two men have been.

The idea of leaving behind a functioning democracy is ash in both of their mouths, but the notion of "staying the course" is only making matters worse. The idea of leaving it to the Iraqis to fight it out whilst we scarper is politically unacceptable.

So what is the solution? I simply cannot see one.

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tag: Bush, Blair, Iraq war, "Stay the course"