Robert Fisk: Things Are Getting Much Worse. It's Not Just A "Spike" Or An "Uptick" In Violence:

"When you go to the manicured lawns and villas of the so-called "Green Zone" in Baghdad, you get this odd, weird feeling; that here is a place so isolated, so ostentatiously secure - it is not secure of course, since mortars are regularly fired into the compound - that it has no contact with the outside world... within the palace walls, the occupying power believes in optimism, progress and political development.

From inside the Green Zone on the banks of the Tigris, you can believe anything. How far can the occupying powers take war-spin before the world stops believing anything they say?

... Baghdad may be dangerous. But at least it's on Planet Earth. "