Iraq’s political leaders are showing promising new signs of progress toward reconciliation, yet still face difficult decisions on how to stabilize the country, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Sunday. “They seem to have become energized over the last few weeks,” Gates told reporters who traveled with him from an international security conference in Munich, Germany. He likened the challenge of passing an Iraqi provincial powers law to the U.S. founding fathers’ struggle to find a constitutional compromise on how to share power in the Congress between big and small states.
Sixty-one percent of the public believes the economy is now suffering through its first recession since 2001, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll. The fallout from a depressed housing market and a credit crunch nearly caused the economy to stall in the final three months of last year. The worry is that consumers and businesses will hunker down further and pull back spending, sending the economy into a tailspin.
A car bomb exploded Sunday near an Iraqi checkpoint in an open-market area north of Baghdad, killing at least 23 civilians and wounding 25, the U.S. military said. The military said U.S. and Iraqi forces had secured the area and the wounded had been evacuated to hospitals. Iraqi police said earlier that a suicide car bomber targeted U.S.-allied fighters and Iraqi security forces at a checkpoint in Yathrib, near Balad, 50 miles north of Baghdad.
