Security in the Green Zone

Professor Juan Cole reports on the terrible security situation of the American Green Zone in Baghdad:

The Green Zone was originally supposed to be the safe place in Iraq, with the area outside it (everything else) called the "Red Zone." The US Embassy in Baghdad appears to have forgotten what the phrase "Green Zone" means, since a spokesman there told the LAT, "There's fire into the Green Zone virtually every day, so I can't draw any conclusions about the security situation based on that . . ."

Let me draw the conclusion. If you've got fire into the friggin' Green Zone every day, then we can draw the conclusion that the security situation in Baghdad sucks big time. When you've got people killed and a large number of people wounded in the one place in Iraq that was supposed to have a "permissive" security environment, then security in general is the pits.

(Emphasis in original.)

Mortar fire into the Green Zone is bad enough, but even worse is the fact that the Iraqi Police Colonel Mahmoud Muhyi Hussein, director of security in the Green Zone, was kidnapped. That requires significant insider knowledge.