Death Toll in Iraq Suicide Bombings Reaches 250

MARGARET WARNER:

It's been a week of spectacular violence in Iraq: suicide bombings in the north taking a toll of hundreds; the kidnapping of a government minister; and random attacks across the country. It's also been a week of further political stalemate in Baghdad, seemingly fruitless meetings among opposing factions and, amidst boycotts and defections, growing questions about whether the government of Prime Minister Maliki can even survive.

We get four assessments of the situation now from Rend al-Rahim, a former Iraqi ambassador to the U.S., she's now executive director of the Iraq Foundation, which promotes democracy there, and she was in Iraq earlier this summer. Jessica Mathews, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, she served in the Carter and Clinton administrations. Trudy Rubin, foreign affairs columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, she travels frequently to Iraq. And Juan Cole, a professor of history at the University of Michigan.

Welcome, guests, all.

Juan Cole, months into this beefed-up U.S. troop presence in Iraq, we see these just horrific bombings yesterday in the far northwest. Is the violence in Iraq unstoppable at this point?

JUAN COLE, University of Michigan: Well, this kind of violence is unstoppable by military means. You couldn't possibly guard all of the small villages in Iraq. There are still big bombs going off in downtown Baghdad. The only way realistically for this violence to end is for the Sunni Arab guerrilla groups that are behind it to be brought into the political process. You have to have something like what happened with the IRA in Britain.

MARGARET WARNER:

So, Rend al-Rahim, the U.S. military is blaming the attacks yesterday on Sunni insurgents, on al-Qaida-affiliated groups. Does this suggest that, if you push them out of one area, they're just going to move on?

REND AL-RAHIM, The Iraq Foundation:

Well, we've seen what happened. I mean, we pushed them out of the Anbar area pretty much. They then moved to Diyala. From Diyala province, they've moved to Kirkuk. We don't really have control of Kirkuk yet, but it does seem a bit like a balloon; you squeeze one end, and it bulges out of the other.

What I very significant — of course, these events were horrific, and the death toll is very high — but what I found very significant is that they happened in the far northwestern corner in Iraq, in an area which is really a backwater, that did not happen in the very big urban areas, in the cities. And one wonders, why? Was it because they targeted those, or because they couldn't operate on that scale anywhere else, that other parts were restrictive to them?

MARGARET WARNER:

What do you think, Jessica Mathews? Do you think the violence is still stoppable or unstoppable?

JESSICA MATHEWS, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: I wouldn't say flatly unstoppable, but it has enormous momentum, internal momentum, and it is so diverse. It's sectarian; it's insurgency, anti-occupation; it's criminal; it's mafia. There are so many different sources of it.

And I should add, it's also political, in the sense that it is militias linked to members of the government. So part of the problem here is that the government is part of the problem.

I think the most the U.S. can do is to keep a temporary lid on the violence and that the only thing ultimately that would dramatically reduce it is a political solution, because this really is a political struggle. We think of it as a "war," because we are at war, but we don't have a particular enemy. So we have to begin to understand it in our domestic debate as a political struggle inside Iraq.

MARGARET WARNER:

Trudy Rubin, that was the premise of the surge, was that if you kept a lid on the violence, tamped down the violence, that there would be political progress, would create the space for political progress, but that seems to be flagging. What is your take on the whole situation now and the relationship between the two, between the violence and the political side?

TRUDY RUBIN, The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Well, I think that there's no question that the whole aim of the surge was, to use the famous phrase, to create space for the political groupings to try to make some kind of a deal. And the premise was that if U.S. troops, the surge with Iraqis, could cut back on the most heinous violence, the car bombings, by al-Qaida or the hardest line of the Baathists, that this would create a situation where there would be less pressure inside the Shiite community for revenge attacks. And that could put a spanner in this endless cycle of violence.

But there's two things I think you have to say. First of all, it's clear that the hardest of the hard line were going to keep trying to do these attacks if they could, especially before the September deadline. So I think Rend's question is the interesting one: Are they doing them further from the center because they can't do them in the center?

The second is, even if you had a political reconciliation, that would be the more, shall we say, moderate or nationalist Sunnis who might be reconciled. You would still have hardliners trying, but you might have a better effort to tamp them down.

Having said all that, there hasn't been any political progress, even amongst the moderates, which is discouraging because the effort of the surge was to try to help those factions.

JESSICA MATHEWS:

And, in fact, I think you could add that the political situation has gotten worse, not just the lack of progress against the benchmarks, but there really has been regression.