Bush's view tough to see on Iraqi streets

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Ali Kathem has trouble seeing the progress that President Bush described Wednesday.

"At least we didn't have terrorism under Saddam Hussein. Now, we have explosions, kidnapping, stealing," said Kathem, 24, who has sold cigarettes on a busy Baghdad roadside for nearly a decade.

In a nearby electronics store, Haider Falleh, 32, said his opinion of the new Iraq crystallized when a half-dozen men in police uniforms, driving police cars, robbed his shop of 45 cellphones. He ran for help at a police checkpoint across the street. They shrugged.

For Ghassan Abdul Haider, 26, a Shiite police officer in the capital, the religious lines dividing the country have kept him from his home in northern Baghdad for three months. The last time he was there, little children brought notes from his Sunni neighbors saying he would be killed.

Bush, in a speech at the U.S. Naval Academy, spoke of progress, of land restored to Iraqi control, of gains in stability and democracy, and of the "skill and courage" of newly trained Iraqi security forces.

But on the streets of Baghdad, such optimistic rhetoric contrasts sharply with the thunder of suicide bombs, the scream of ambulance sirens, the roar of racing police cars bearing men with masks and machine guns, and the grim daily reports of assassinations, murders and hostage-taking.

On the same day Bush spoke, gunmen killed nine farmworkers on a bus near Baqouba, snipers fired on the office of a National Assembly member, and three Iraqi army officers were wounded by a bomb. In Fallujah, 20,000 people marched in a funeral for a slain Sunni cleric.

That was a quiet day in Iraq.

Statistics are slippery in Iraq, but almost every attempt to quantify the violence shows a grim trend.

Multiple-death bombings reached an all-time high of 46 in September, a record likely to be broken in November, when more than 400 people died in bombings. The Brookings Institution estimates there are roughly 100 attacks every day, double the rate of a year ago, and between 200 and 300 Iraqi policemen and soldiers are killed each month. The 93 U.S. troop fatalities in October exceeded all but three of the past 32 months, according to Brookings.

Iraqis generally agree that things are awful, but there is less unanimity about what should be done.

At the National Assembly on Wednesday, some leaders differed on Bush's plan for gradual withdrawal.

"You can see the strong blows that have been made against the main center of the insurgency, and the large numbers of terrorists in detention," said Jawad Maliki, head of the security committee of the parliament, siding with Bush in insisting Iraqi security forces are greatly improved.

Adnan Janabi, a former minister of state, scoffed.

"I don't think anyone thinks security is better," Janabi said. He said the unilateral decisions made when Americans first occupied Iraq, and the frequent replacement of officials in the Iraqi government since then, have left the country teetering and vulnerable.

"We had started straightening up the mess with the police and army that was created by Bremer," Janabi said, referring to L. Paul Bremer, the former U.S. administrator in Iraq. But the changing of the government was a setback, he said.

The Kurds in Iraq's north are the least eager among Iraqi groups to see the departure of the U.S., which has helped ensure a large degree of autonomy for them.

Ali Abdul-Amir Allawi, a former defense minister and now the finance minister, said he saw a growing movement toward carving up Iraq — one region for Shiites, one for Sunnis, one for Kurds. That notion has stoked fears of a civil war among the sects when the Americans leave.

"We see the beginning of that already. All these assassinations every day," said Wael Abdul-Latif, a parliament member who helped write the constitution. "The security is deteriorating. It's becoming worse day by day."

In his electronics shop, Falleh predicted that "if the American troops leave right away, there will be massacres between Sunnis and Shiites. If they go, there will be no law left. But they are a target here," he said. "The U.S. troops make the situation worse."

He paused, struggling to make a choice.

"I guess what I'm saying is that if they stay, they will cause problems. If they leave, they will cause bigger problems."