Out of Touch

Joe Lieberman last week:

"The situation in Iraq is a lot better that it was a year ago," Lieberman observed. The Iraqis "are on the way to building a free and independent Iraq. Two-thirds of their military is now ready, on their own, to lead the fight with some logistical backing from the U.S. or stand up on their own totally. That's progress. And the question is, are we going to abandon them when they are making that progress?"

Reality:

Blindfolded, hands tied behind them, and most shot in the head, 22 bodies of kidnapped Shiites have been found as US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld arrived in Iraq to review worsening security in Baghdad.

In another gruesome example of the sectarian bloodshed that has engulfed Iraq, the 22 Shiites were part of a group of upto 80 who were kidnapped earlier Wednesday in the town of Muqdadiyah, northeast of Baghdad.

The fate of the other missing Shiites was not immediately known.

More reality...

Many in Iraq expressed fear that the recent attacks were pushing the country past isolated killings into civil war.

Two car bombs exploded Monday morning on a commercial street in the Shiite slum of Sadr City in Baghdad in apparent retribution for the killings of Sunnis the day before. The two bombs, within 10 minutes of each other, crumbled buildings, killed 11 people and injured 17 others, Col. Sami Jasim of the Interior Ministry said. The second explosion was aimed at a police patrol, a frequent target of attacks in recent months.

Then masked gunmen wearing civilian clothes set up a checkpoint in the violence-plagued Sunni neighborhood of Amiriyah, pulled seven passengers from a Kia minibus and shot them dead in the street, Interior Ministry Brig. Gen Mahmoud Nima said. Nima said that Iraqi army soldiers near the scene failed to intervene. Some Sunni politicians alleged Sunday that the killings in al-Jihad were the work of the Mahdi Army, a powerful Shiite militia, in concert with Iraqi police officers.

Violence also flared in the northern city of Kirkuk, where a suicide truck bomber drove into a Kurdish political party office and killed three people and wounded 20 others, Lt. Col. Shwan Abdullah of the Kirkuk police said. A short time later, a bomb detonated near a rival Kurdish party office in the city, wounding three people, he said.

What world is Lieberman living in?