More Grim News From Iraq

The Skinny: More Grim News From Iraq
WASHINGTON, Dec. 19, 2006

(CBS) The Skinny is Hillary Profita's take on the top news of the day and the best of the Internet.

A Pentagon quarterly report released as Robert Gates began his tenure as the new defense secretary revealed that this fall marked a record period of insurgent violence, with "an average of almost 960 attacks against Americans and Iraqis every week, the highest level recorded since the Pentagon began issuing the quarterly reports in 2005," writes the New York Times. "The violence has escalated at an unbelievably rapid pace," said Marine Lt. Gen. John F. Sattler, director of strategic plans and policy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post highlight the report on their front pages as does the Wall Street Journal's newsbox. "Also stated for the first time," the report said that Moktada al-Sadr's Shiite militia "has replaced al-Qaeda as 'the most dangerous' force propelling Iraq toward civil war, as Shiite militants kill more civilians than do terrorists," writes the Post. Identifying the situation in Iraq as a "civil war" is still apparently touchy territory, but this report "unlike the prior one, "omitted any explicit statement that Iraq is not in a civil war," writes the Post. But, the LA Times writes, "the report stops short of calling the sectarian conflict a civil war." Instead, the report took this route in parsing the phrase: "The situation in Iraq is far more complex than the term 'civil war' implies," said the report, the Post explains. "Conditions that could lead to civil war do exist," it said, but added that the Iraqi government, backed by the U.S.-led coalition, "could mitigate further movement toward civil war and curb sectarian violence." The NY Times writes that "indications of progress" in the report "were few." While the report said the Iraqi government was taking "incremental" steps at increasing its responsibility and leadership among security forces, "it remained 'urgent' for the Iraqi government 'to demonstrate a resolve to contain and terminate sectarian attacks.'" More U.S. Troops To Iraq? The debate over whether to send a surge of troops into Iraq for a temporary period of several months is raging not only on the Sunday morning talking heads shows, but within the White House. "US officials familiar with the intense debate" tell the Washington Post that the White House is "aggressively promoting the concept over the unanimous disagreement of the Joint Chiefs of Staff." According to the Post's sources, the Joint Chiefs "think the White House, after a month of talks, still does not have a defined mission and is latching on to the surge idea in part because of limited alternatives, despite warnings about the potential disadvantages for the military..." An anonymous "senior administration official" told the paper that it is "'too simplistic' to say the surge question has broken down into a fight between the White House and the Pentagon, but the official acknowledged that the military has questioned the option." Sunny Iraq Still Doesn't Have Much Electricity The NY Times front page also brings news of the veritable "electrical siege" on Baghdad, "reflected in constant power failures and disastrously poor service in the capital..." The towers that support power lines are frequently the object of explosives and the crews that attempt to repair them are "often attacked and sometimes killed." It's estimated by the State Department that there is an average of about 7 hours of electricity a day in Baghdad and about 9 hours nationwide. "Many Iraqis contend" that those figures "lean toward the optimistic side." According to the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, before the war, Baghdad had 16 to 24 hours of power and the rest of Iraq 4 to 8 hours. The Iraqi electricity minister has a plan for repair that would cost $27 billion over 10 years. The Post writes that "some electricity experts knowledgeable about the plan say that even under optimistic assumptions, those enormous expenditures would not bring electrical supplies in line with demand before 2009." "I don't know how the people in Iraq are going to accept that reality," one Iraqi electrical engineer told the Post. "That after five years, six years, they are still suffering from a lack of electricity ."