Summary here and here.

Authorities in northern Iraq imposed an indefinite curfew in the Sunni stronghold of Samarra after leaflets signed by rival insurgent groups threatened police officers if they did not quit their jobs and promised to target any oil company that wants to explore in the area. The warnings to the policemen were signed by al-Qaida in Iraq and threatened to destroy their houses if they didn’t comply.

Leaflets signed by a separate insurgent umbrella group calling itself the Mujahedeen of Samarra warned against oil exploration in the area and were posted on the walls of mosques in central Samarra, 95 kilometres (60 miles) north of Baghdad. Article

Crumbling ’round the very, very frayed edges.

An Iraqi Sunni lawmaker urged his party Sunday to withdraw from the Shiite-led government if it fails to better protect citizens from sectarian bloodshed.

Khalaf al-Ilyan, one of the three leaders of the Iraqi Accordance Front, said his party should set a timetable for the government to end mass killings and “stop threatening lawmakers” from his party. Article

Related?

A department of the Iraqi prime minister’s office is playing a leading role in the arrest and removal of senior Iraqi army and national police officers, some of whom had apparently worked too aggressively to combat violent Shiite militias, according to U.S. military officials in Baghdad.

Since March 1, at least 16 army and national police commanders have been fired, detained or pressured to resign; at least nine of them are Sunnis, according to U.S. military documents shown to The Washington Post.

Although some of the officers appear to have been fired for legitimate reasons, such as poor performance or corruption, several were considered to be among the better Iraqi officers in the field. The dismissals have angered U.S. and Iraqi leaders who say the Shiite-led government is sabotaging the military to achieve sectarian goals.

[snip]

…Col. Ehrich Rose, chief of the Military Transition Team with the 4th Iraqi Army Division, who has spent several years working with foreign armies, said the Iraqi officer corps is riddled with divergent loyalties to different sects, tribes and political groups.

“The Iraqi army, as far as capability goes, I’d stack them up against just about any Latin American army I’ve dealt with,” he said. “However, the politicization of their officer corps is the worst I’ve ever seen.”

At the national level, some U.S. officials are increasingly concerned about the Office of the Commander in Chief, a behind-the-scenes department that works on military issues for the prime minister.

[snip]

A senior Iraqi army official said he plans to seek assistance from Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, in limiting the office’s interference in the daily duties of the military. “We need his help to stop these noises,” the official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity.

[snip]

A spokesman for the Interior Ministry, which oversees the national police, said his agency removes only officers who have committed crimes or whose political and sectarian leanings influence their work. An estimated 14,000 Interior Ministry employees have been purged for criminal behavior or ties to insurgents or militias, according to the spokesman, Gen. Abdul Karim Khalaf Qanani. Article

Chaos begets chaos.

Saleh Nizar, a 58-year-old gardener, says he was tortured in an Iraqi prison after he was arrested and accused of participating in an attack in the capital, Baghdad. He was arrested on 15 October 2006 and set free on 5 April 2007 after he was helped by a senior Iraqi officer who said that Nizar was his gardener and that he was definitely innocent.

As result of the torture he endured, one of his legs sustained serious injuries and doctors said it might require amputation. Nizar, who has a heart condition which he did not receive treatment for while in prison, now spends much of his time in hospitals and clinics trying to stay alive.

[snip]

“The most common torture was the use of electric shocks and cigarettes to burn our skin. Other times they would beat us with pieces of wood or electrical wire.

“Some detainees were also raped by the officers in front of everyone. And if the victim tried to run away, they hit him with a piece of wood. The suffering I endured in prison was doubled because in addition to the pain that I had after each torture session, there was also the desperate screaming of the other prisoners.

[snip]

“The only thing I have now is to wait for death because those bastards knew how to end my life in this world.” Article

Interesting, especially as to how it exposes yet another instance of the utter cluelessness and hollow bluster of the woebegone G. Walker administration.

Bush administration officials have been scratching their heads over steps taken by Prince Bandar’s uncle, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, that have surprised them by going against the American playbook, after receiving assurances to the contrary from Prince Bandar during secret trips he made to Washington.

[snip]

Most bitingly, during a speech before Arab heads of state in Riyadh three weeks ago, the king condemned the American invasion of Iraq as “an illegal foreign occupation.” The Bush administration, caught off guard, was infuriated, and administration officials have found Prince Bandar hard to reach since.

Since the Iraq war and the attendant plummeting of America’s image in the Muslim world, King Abdullah has been striving to set a more independent and less pro-American course, American and Arab officials said. And that has steered America’s relationship with its staunchest Arab ally into uncharted waters. Prince Bandar, they say, may no longer be able to serve as an unerring beacon of Saudi intent.

“The problem is that Bandar has been pursuing a policy that was music to the ears of the Bush administration, but was not what King Abdullah had in mind at all,” said Martin S. Indyk, a former United States ambassador to Israel who is now head of the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy.

Of course it is ultimately the king – and not the prince – who makes the final call on policy. More than a dozen associates of Prince Bandar, including personal friends and Saudi officials who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that if his counsel has led to the recent misunderstandings, it is due to his longtime penchant for leaving room in his dispatches for friends to hear what they want to hear. That approach, they said, is catching up to the prince as new tensions emerge between the United States and Saudi Arabia.

[snip]

…several associates of Prince Bandar acknowledge that he feels caught between the opposing pressure of the king and that of his close friends in the Bush administration. It is a relationship that Prince Bandar has fostered with great care and attention to detail over the years, making himself practically indispensable to Mr. Bush, his family and his aides. Article

Shorter version: Those beseiged recognize a tool, not an ally.

Yet for all the indications of a heartening turnaround in Anbar, the situation, as it appeared during more than a week spent with American troops in Ramadi and Falluja in early April, is at best uneasy and fragile.

[snip]

Furthermore, some American officials readily acknowledge that they have entered an uncertain marriage of convenience with the tribes, some of whom were themselves involved in the insurgency, to one extent or another. American officials are also negotiating with elements of the 1920 Revolution Brigades, a leading insurgent group in Anbar, to join their fight against Al Qaeda.

[snip]

For all the sheiks’ hostility toward the Americans, they realized that they had a bigger enemy, or at least one that needed to be fought first, as a matter of survival.

[snip]

The Ramadi region is essentially a police state now, with some 6,000 American troops, 4,000 Iraqi soldiers and 4,500 Iraqi police officers, including an auxiliary police force of about 2,000, all local tribesmen, known as the Provincial Security Force.…

[snip]

…American commanders say they are not particularly worried about infiltrators among the new recruits. Many of the former insurgents now in the police, they say, were probably low-level operatives who were mainly in it for the money and did relatively menial tasks, like planting roadside bombs.

The speed of the buildup has led to other problems. Hiring has outpaced the building of police academies, meaning that many new officers have been deployed with little or no training. Without enough uniforms, many new officers patrol in civilian clothes, some with their heads wrapped in scarves or covered in balaclavas to conceal their identities. They look no different than the insurgents shown in mujahedeen videos. Article

Further peeking under the surface here.

Can’t get any more succinct than is the pulled quote.

…”This is not a security plan. It is security chaos.” Article

Unsure quite what to make of this (at least without more background). Tragic, yes. Trend? Not enough info to scope out.

Lowered (asymptotically approaching the horizontal line of the graph) expectations #1 and #2.

Related:

…in the run-up to an expected presidential veto, consensus is building around three approaches.

[snip]

“For some time, the assumption has been that eventually Democrats would have to go along with some kind of funding, absent timetables,” says John Pitney, a political scientist at Claremont-McKenna College in Claremont, Calif.

“But it’s possible that that isn’t true, especially with reports that the administration is putting off its evaluation of the surge until September,” he adds. “At some time, the public patience will run out.” Article

Yuppers.

“To put this in a simple army metaphor, the Commander-in-Chief seems to have gone AWOL, that is ‘absent without leave.’ He neither acts nor talks as though he is in charge. Rather, he engages in tit-for-tat games.

“Some in Congress on both sides of the aisle have responded with their own tits-for-tats. These kinds of games, however, are no longer helpful, much less amusing. They merely reflect the absence of effective leadership in a crisis. And we are in a crisis.

“Most Americans suspect that something is fundamentally wrong with the President’s management of the conflict in Iraq. And they are right.

“The challenge we face today is not how to win in Iraq; it is how to recover from a strategic mistake: invading Iraq in the first place. The war could never have served American interests. Article

Keeping up with the courts-martial.

#1:

A hearing opens Monday to determine whether a U.S. officer should be court-martialed for nine alleged violations of military law, including aiding the enemy while he commanded a military police detachment at a main detention center here.

[snip]

The alleged incidents took place from October 2005 to February 2007, starting when Steele was commander of the 451st Military Police Detachment at Camp Cropper and in his later post as a senior patrol officer for the provincial transition team headquarters at nearby Camp Victory.

The U.S. military command has called the allegations against Steele troublesome but emphasized that none of them had been proven yet.

During the Steele hearings, the investigative officer was expected to bar reporters from the court if evidence was raised that could affect U.S. national security. Article

#2:

Army Spc. Sean J. Maxwell was sentenced to 10 months of confinement, a reduced rank and a bad conduct discharge, the military said in a statement. The court-martial was held April 17 at Camp Victory, the main military base outside Baghdad.

Maxwell, of the Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 324th Military Police Battalion, 16th Military Police Brigade, “intentionally failed to return to Iraq after his scheduled leave” on Jan. 20 and was listed as absent without leave from Jan. 23 to about Feb. 5, the military said. Article