The Guardian puts it starkly.
The government admitted yesterday that the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq had gone "much worse" than expected, while implicitly criticising George Bush for his notorious postwar "mission accomplished" declaration.
In one of the most candid assessments yet, the foreign secretary, David Miliband, said that the battle to contain the insurgency in Iraq was still "in the balance". "It seems to me absolutely clear that the war itself went better than most people expected, but that the building of the peace afterwards has gone much worse than people expected," he told MPs.
This was "a basic truth" and the mission had "not yet been accomplished".
New York Times correspondents write that "the fighting threatened to destabilize a long-term truce that had helped reduce the level of violence in the five-year-old Iraq war."
The scale and intensity of the clashes in Baghdad kept many residents home. Schools and shops were closed in many neighborhoods and hundreds of checkpoints appeared; in some neighborhoods they were controlled by the government and in others by militia members.
Barrages of rockets and mortar shells pounded the fortified Green Zone area for the second time in three days. An American military spokesman said there were two minor injuries to civilians in the Green Zone.
Even before the crackdown on militias began on Tuesday, Pentagon statistics on the frequency of militia and insurgent attacks suggested that after major security gains last fall, the conflict had drifted into something of a stalemate. Over all, violence has remained fairly steady over the past several months, but the streets have become tense and much more dangerous again after a period of calm.
Joost Hilterman, Middle East Project Director, International Crisis Group, and someone who's very close to the action, emphasizes that this is an intra-ethnic struggle. He believes the situation has the potential for a real blow-up. Stephen Myers of the New York Times, in the same discussion, thinks that the apparent intrusion of Iran into the situation may be a serious, added complication.
