Iraq Slips Slowly Out of Control

Posted on September 16, 2004

The steady concession of territory in Iraq to the insurgency has reached a startling new level: the Financial Times is reporting that the military has now declared Baghdad’s Green Zone “no longer totally secure“.

The Green Zone is the part of that city that used to be Saddam Hussein’s governmental complex. When we took over, we fortified the hell out of it and turned it into a kind of Baghdad-on-the-Potomac, a little bit of America in the middle of Iraq. It is the one place in the country where Americans were supposed to be able to travel without fear of ambush. Though insurgents had struck near the Green Zone before — most notably in an Oct. 23, 2003 rocket attack on the al Rashid Hotel, where Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying at the time — none has yet penetrated into the Zone itself.

If the military isn’t even willing to call the Green Zone safe anymore, the security situation on the ground over there must be pretty grim.