A War on Rewind, in a Bleaker Baghdad

Iraqi soldier guards captured suspected militants in Baqouba, Iraq Tuesday, June 19, 2007. About 10,000 U.S. soldiers using heavily armored Stryker and Bradley fighting vehicles fought their way in Baqouba northeast of Baghdad early Tuesday. American and Iraqi forces, under cover of attack helicopters, killed at least 22 insurgents, the military said. (AP Photo/Talal Mohammed) (Talal Mohammed - AP)

For Iraq's army and police, the losses were even heavier. And after easing earlier this year, the toll on civilians appears to be rising again in the unending cycle of sectarian killings by Sunni Muslim bombers and Shiite Muslim death squads. Last month was one of the bloodiest on record _ by Associated Press count, at least 2,155 civilians and Iraqi security forces were killed.

This war has survived countless "turning points," including last June's killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, a U.S. success some in Washington touted as a prelude to a "sea change" in U.S. fortunes.

It wasn't. Now U.S. hopes rest on "Imposing the Law," the four-month-old security crackdown, a "surge" of U.S. reinforcements billed as a promising change of strategy. But this, too, is another echo _ of "Together Forward," launched in June last year, and "Lightning" of a year before that.

This 2007 operation already shows the weakness that undercut the others, lackluster support from an Iraqi army plagued with desertions and reluctant troops.

"Units that deployed came into Baghdad at only about 60 to 65 percent of their authorized strength," Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey, outgoing chief U.S. trainer for Iraqi forces, told an interviewer.

The U.S. command points to progress in the western province of Anbar, where Sunni tribal chiefs have turned against al-Qaida. But some of Anbar's long-running violence seems simply to have moved to Diyala, a province north of Baghdad. On Tuesday, more than 10,000 U.S. soldiers poured into Diyala's capital, Baqouba, on Tuesday as part of major offensives against insurgents outside of Baghdad.

Sunni fighters remain defiant, meanwhile, in such strongholds as the "triangle of death" towns south of Baghdad, where they captured and killed two U.S. soldiers in June last year, and seized two others, still missing, this May.

In Baghdad, death squads the past year have rearranged the sectarian checkerboard of neighborhoods. The mixed west Baghdad districts of Hurriyah and Jihad have turned solidly Shiite, and Sunnis have driven Shiites from the southern district of Dora.

More and more, this centuries-old city is a maze of debris-blocked streets, abandoned houses and long gray walls of 13-foot-high concrete barriers, erected by the Americans to guard against car bombings.

"In two months over 3,200 of these temporary protective barriers were put into Rusafa" _ the part of Baghdad east of the Tigris River _ said command spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell last month.

Along with the everyday threats of death, Baghdadis have had to grapple, even more than they did a year ago, with the slow collapse of everyday life.

Electricity, available a few hours a day, grows scarcer. Four years after the U.S. vowed to restore power, the supply in early June was 8 percent below the 2006 level. Oil production, vital to Iraq's economy, remains crippled _ at levels even lower than last June's production. The queues at gasoline stations sap hours of people's days.