A war on rewind, in a bleaker Baghdad

June 19, 2007
A war on rewind, in a bleaker Baghdad

At the White House last June, back from a secretive trip to Baghdad, an upbeat
President Bush told reporters assembled in the Rose Garden, "I sense something different happening in Iraq."

It's June again and those roses are once more in bloom. But in Baghdad the scene looks only bleaker.

To a visitor returning after a year, the something different is the spread of concrete blast barriers across ever more of the city, the accumulation of still more rubble, the sectarian "cleansing" of neighborhoods, the ruin of still more lives — of friends whose loved ones have fled, been kidnapped, been killed. And for those left behind, life is worse.