THE STATE OF IRAQ'S UNION

(the Iraqi) Parliament in recent months has been at a standstill. Nearly every session since November has been adjourned because as few as 65 members made it to work, even as they and the absentees earned salaries and benefits worth about $120,000.

Part of the problem is security, but Iraqi officials also said they feared that members were losing confidence in the institution and in the country's fragile democracy. As chaos has deepened, Parliament's relevance has gradually receded.

Deals on important legislation, most recently the oil law, now take place largely out of public view, with Parliament--when it meets--rubber-stamping the final decisions. As a result, officials said, vital legislation involving the budget, provincial elections and amendments to the Constitution remain trapped in a legislative process that processes nearly nothing. American officials long hoped that Parliament could help foster dialogue between Iraq's increasingly fractured ethnic and religious groups, but that has not happened, either.
--"Iraq Parliament Finds a Quorum Hard to Come By," Damien Cave, New York Times, January 24, 2007

Over the past six months, Baghdad has been all but isolated electrically, Iraqi officials say, as insurgents have effectively won their battle to bring down critical high-voltage lines and cut off the capital from the major power plants to the north, south, and west.

The battle has been waged in the remotest parts of the open desert, where the great towers that support thousands of miles of exposed lines are frequently felled with explosive charges in increasingly determined and sophisticated attacks, generally at night. Crews that arrive to repair the damage are often attacked and sometimes killed, ensuring that the government falls further and further behind in its attempts to repair the lines.

…Skilled looters often arrive with heavy trucks that pull down more of the towers to steal as much of the valuable aluminum conducting material in the lines as possible…

What amounts to an electrical siege of Baghdad is reflected in constant power failures and disastrously poor service in the capital, with severe consequences for security, governance, health care and the mood of an already weary and angry populace.
--"Iraq Insurgents Starve Capital of Electricity, James Glanz, New York Times, December 19, 2006

About 1,000 British and Iraqi troops raided a police station in the southern city of Basra on Monday, killing seven gunmen and taking custody of more than 100 prisoners who were believed to be marked for execution by a renegade police unit.

Many of the prisoners at the Jamiat police station showed signs of torture, including cigarette and electrical burns, gunshot wounds to their legs and knees, and hands that had been crushed, said Capt. Tane Dunlop, a spokesman for British forces in Iraq. The station, a base for a squad known as the serious crimes unit, was later blown up by British forces.
--British Troops Raid, Raze Station House in Southern Iraq, Nancy Trejos and Sudarsan Raghavan, Washington Post, December 26, 2006

The United States established the Central Criminal Court of Iraq three years ago, envisioning it as a pillar of new democracy. But like the faltering effort to create effective Iraqi security forces, the system for detaining, charging and trying suspects has instead become another weak link in the rule of law in Iraq, according to an examination of the justice system by the New York Times.

…Almost every aspect of the judicial system is lacking, poorly serving not just detainees but also Iraqi citizens and troops trying to maintain order.

A classified Pentagon assessment completed in June of the American effort to strengthen Iraqi justice found one sign of progress: the prosecution of former senior government officials. Everything else, from training judges to building court capacity to minimizing civil rights abuses by Iraqi security forces, had fallen behind, according to the assessment by the National Security Council.

…"The most fundamental thing we need to do in Iraq is establish the rule of law," said Mark Waller, an Air Force Reserve major and deputy district attorney in Colorado, who spent four months this year in Baghdad helping to prosecute detainees. "It's the cornerstone of a civilization. Without it you have anarchy. And we are falling short."
--"The Legal System in Iraq Staggers Beneath the Weight of War," Michael Moss, New York Times, December 17, 2006

The Bush administration routinely has underreported the level of violence in Iraq in order to disguise its policy failings, the Iraq Study Group report said.

…"The standard for reporting attacks acts as a filter to keep events out of reports and databases," the report said. "…If we cannot determine the source of a sectarian attack, that assault does not make it into the database. A roadside bomb or a rocket or mortar attack that doesn't hut U.S. personnel doesn't count."

Bush and his top officials have denied the allegations and accused the news media of exaggerating the violence between Iraqi Shiite and Sunni Muslims, minority Kurds and other groups.
--"Study Says Violence in Iraq Has Been Underreported," Jonathan S. Landay, McClatchy Newspapers, December 6, 2006

Along with its many other desperate problems, Iraq is in the midst of a housing crises that is worsening by the day.

It began right after the toppling of Saddam Hussein, when many landlords took advantage of the removal of his economic controls and raised rents substantially, forcing out thousands of families who took shelter in abandoned government buildings and military bases. As the chaos in Iraq grew and the ranks of the jobless swelled, even more Iraqis migrated to squalid squatter encampments. Still others constructed crude shantytowns on empty plots where conditions were even worse.

Now, after more than 10 months of brutal sectarian reprisals, many more Iraqis have fled their neighborhoods, only to wind up often in places that are just as wretched in other ways. While 1.8 million Iraqis are living outside the country, 1.6 million more have been displaced within Iraq since the war began. Since February, about 50,000 per month have moved within the country.

…With many families in such encampments or worse, and many others doubled or tripled up in friends' or relatives' homes, the deputy housing minister, Istabraq al-Shouk, puts the shortage at two million dwellings across Iraq.
--"Crises in Housing Adds to Miseries of Iraq Mayhem," Michael Luo, New York Times, December 29, 2006

Iraq is emerging as one of the fastest-growing refugee crises in the world, with an estimated 1.8 million Iraqis displaced from their homes and up to 100,000 fleeing the country to Jordan, Syria, and other nations amid intensifying sectarian violence, U.S. and other officials testified yesterday.

Yet the United States has allowed only 466 Iraqis to immigrate under refugee status since 2003…
--Iraq Refugee Crises Seen Deepening," Ann Scott Tyson, Washington Post, January 17, 2007

The level of corruption in the Iraq Security Forces is staggering. The Iraq Study Group found that $5 billion to $7 billion is lost annually to different types of corruption…

…The most prominent forms of corruption I saw were Iraqi commanders pocketing the paychecks of nonexistent troops in the Iraqi army and officers in the police forces, and customs officials abetting the smuggling of oil and precious rebuilding supplies across Iraq's porous borders.

A United States interagency panel reported in November that oil smuggling abetted by corrupt Iraqi customs officials is netting insurgents $100 million a year, helping make them financially self-sustaining.
--"Losing Iraq, One Truckload at a Time," Luis Carlos Montalvan, New York Times op-ed, January 14, 2007. Luis Carlos Montalvan is a U.S. Army captain.

The United Nations reported that more than 34,000 Iraqis were killed in violence last year, a figure that represents the first comprehensive annual count of civilian deaths and a vivid measure of the failure of the Iraqi government and the American military to provide security.

The report was the first attempt at hand-counting individual deaths for an entire year. It was compiled using reports from morgues, hospitals and municipal authorities across Iraq, and was nearly three times higher than an estimate for 2006 compiled from Iraqi ministry tallies…

…The violence has expanded to the point of leaving hospitals and morgues overflowing with bodies. The report described the discovery of several recent mass graves.
--"Iraqi Death Toll Exceeded 34,000 in '06, U.N. Says," Sabrina Tavernise, New York Times, January 17, 2007

(Wolf Blitzer, CNN "Situation Room") But there is a terrible situation (in Iraq.)

(Vice President Dick Cheney) No, there is not. There is not…

(Blitzer, later in the interview) ...So you're moving forward no matter what the consequences?

(Cheney) We are moving forward.

(Blitzer, returning to the subject later) Here's the problem that you have--the administration--credibility in Congress and with the American public, because of the mistakes, because of the previous statements, the last throes, the comment you made a year-and-a-half ago, the insurgency was in its last throes. How do you build up that credibility because so many of the Democrats, and a lot of Republicans now are saying they don't believe you anymore?

(Cheney) Well, Wolf, if the history books were written by people who have--are so eager to write off this effort, to declare it a failure, including many of our friends in the media, the situation obviously would have been over a long time ago. Bottom line is that we've had enormous success, and we will continue to have enormous successes.
--"Interview of the Vice President by Wolf Blitzer, CNN 'Situation Room', provided by the Vice President's Ceremonial Office, January 24, 2007