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This was Katie Couric's chance to tour the neighborhoods of Baghdad with Gen Raymond Odierno for CBS' Road Ahead series. She called Iraq's capital "a shell of its former self--it is still a mess." Odierno's campaign to make the city safe relies on so-called Joint Security Stations, small community-based police stations manned by GIs, Iraqi soldiers and local police. "Iraqis know the neighborhood. The Americans have the know-how and the gear," Couric explained. Their tactics include tasks as simple as sweeping the sidewalks, painting concrete barriers that block carbombs and subsidizing markets to reopen their stalls. Odierno's efforts resulted in only four killed in random shootings and only 15 corpses dumped throughout the city last Saturday night, what Couric called "a significant improvement" from last year's daily murder toll of 85. Meanwhile back at the Pentagon, NBC's Jim Miklaszewski countered that an independent commission would call for Iraq's national police to be disbanded because it is "crippled by sectarianism" and "infiltrated by Shiite militants." His unidentified military sources told him "without a reliable Iraqi police force no amount of any American military surge will fix Iraq's security problems."
On ABC, anchor Charles Gibson (subscription required) convened a roundtable to forecast the future for US military deployment in Iraq. He quizzed ABC's in-house military analyst Jack Keane, a retired USArmy general, ABC's in-house geopolitical journalist Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek International and former diplomat Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations. Zakaria was reassuring that a withdrawal of US troops would not lead to genocide: "The dirty little secret about Iraq is that Iraq has already been ethnically cleansed. It is sad to say but the American army has presided over the largest ethnic cleansing in the world since the Balkans." But all three agreed that there will be a significant, gradual reduction of US troop levels--neither precipitous nor total--leaving a permanent garrison of 50,000-or-so in Iraq.
After Couric on the Road Ahead came CBS' Lara Logan. She edited together eyepopping video clips from what she called "al-Qaeda propaganda" of the latest guerrilla weapon against US armored vehicles. It is a Russian-made hand grenade with a small parachute in the handle that "stabilizes the grenade and ensures it comes down vertically on its target; the shape charge inside punches through the armor and slow-burning explosives are released to ensure the deadliest effect." As soon as the ambushers throw the grenade "they start to run away as fast as they can" to avoid being hit themselves. "The back blast is so huge."
And CBS' Mark Strassmann took us out to the remote "desolate and dangerous" desert in Diyala Province where a giant broadcasting tower, built for Saddam Hussein and guarded by GIs, transmits for the station IRTN. A year ago IRTN had a staff of 55 but a dozen of them were murdered and almost all the rest quit in intimidation. That leaves the quartet of hosts, two men, two women, two Sunni Moslems, two Shiite, living at the studios. "Only in Iraq could a television show called Common Ground be a potential death wish."
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