An injured Iraqi is treated after a stone-throwing mob — blam­ing the United States for the deadly explo­sions — attacked U.S. forces out­side Camp Bon­zai in Bagh­dad. (John Moore/AP)

Yesterday’s coor­di­nated bomb­ings in Bagh­dad and Kar­bala, which killed at least 145 peo­ple — and pos­si­bly as many 180 271 —  has led to a surge in anti-Americanism across Iraq as Shi’ites blame the U.S. for secu­rity fail­ings.

“It is you Amer­i­cans you have done this!” said a man in the yard out­side a Bagh­dad hos­pi­tal, moments after he had found his brother lying dead inside.
Dou­bled over in grief with his fists balled in rage, he lurched at three U.S. mil­i­tary police stand­ing nearby as his friends held him back. Other Iraqis lashed out at U.S. jour­nal­ists and smashed pho­tog­ra­phers’ cam­eras.
“Why have you Amer­i­cans done this to us?” shrieked a woman draped from head to toe in black as she fol­lowed a reporter down the street near Baghdad’s Kad­himiya shrine, where at least 58 peo­ple were killed.

As one of my mil­i­tary sources told me this morn­ing, “it’s a bad time to be in Iraq.“
Indeed. And it’s likely to get worse, despite offi­cials’ call for calm and a three-day mourn­ing period. Yesterday’s attacks, Iraq’s dead­liest day since last May, were sophis­ti­cated and bru­tally effec­tive. Three sui­cide bombers pen­e­trated two secu­rity perime­ters in Kad­himiya in Bagh­dad near the Shi’ite shrine. A fourth was arrested before his sui­cide belt went off. At almost the exact same time, attack­ers used sui­cide bombers and mor­tar attacks on the shrine in Kar­bala, killing at least 85 peo­ple. But it could have been even worse. In Basra, British troops arrested two women sui­cide bombers, who were appar­ently on their way to blow them­selves up among tens of thou­sands of Shi’ite wor­ship­pers. A car bomb also was found out­side Seyed Ali al-Musawi Mosque. A 22-pound TNT bomb was found on a road near Kirkuk where Shi’ites planned to march.
This was a direct assault on Shi’ite Islam’s holi­est hol­i­days, Yom Ashura, which the Shi’ites ven­er­ate as the day that the Prophet’s grand­son, Husayn ibn Ali, was killed in the Bat­tle of Kar­bala in 680. Shi’ites revere Ali as the Third Imam and the right­ful suc­ces­sor to Muham­mad. Attack­ing Shi’ites and their holy shrines on this day is a direct attack on Shi’a Islam itself.
These attacks will encour­age the local mili­tias to keep their weapons and Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, the most pow­er­ful openly polit­i­cally active Shi’ite in Iraq, has said his Supreme Coun­cil for Islamic Rev­o­lu­tion in Iraq (SCIRI) will not dis­arm and should have been allowed to pro­vide for secu­rity. Grand Aya­tol­lah Ali al-Sistani, whose words carry enor­mous weight with Iraq’s Shi’ites, blamed the Amer­i­cans for lax secu­rity.
“We call on all dear Iraqi sons to be more vig­i­lant against the schemes of the enemy, and ask them to work hard to unite and have one voice to speed up regain­ing the injured country’s sov­er­eignty and inde­pen­dence and sta­bil­ity,” Sis­tani said in a state­ment. “We put respon­si­bil­ity on the occu­pa­tion forces for the notice­able pro­cras­ti­na­tion in con­trol­ling the bor­ders of Iraq and pre­vent­ing infil­tra­tors, and not strength­en­ing Iraqi national forces and sup­ply­ing them with the nec­es­sary equip­ment to do their jobs.”
He’s right. While nearly 10,000 mem­bers of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, 67,000 Iraqi Police and about 9,000 bor­der guards are on the job, that’s not nearly enough. And their rushed train­ing, in an effort to boost num­bers, has pro­duced poorly armed, if well-meaning rent-a-cops. These guys don’t have the equip­ment or the train­ing to deal with sui­cide bombers, and 105,000 Amer­i­can G.I.s along with 20,000 British and other troops won’t be enough to pro­vide the secu­rity that Iraqis crave.
The most likely mas­ter­mind sus­pect for the attacks is, of course, Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi. A Jor­dan­ian Sunni who may or may not have ties to al Qaeda via Ansar al-Islam, he is widely regarded as the author of a let­ter cap­tured last month detail­ing plans for increased attacks against Iraqis in the hopes of spark­ing a sec­tar­ian war. Aston­ish­ingly, the U.S. appeared to have had sev­eral oppor­tu­ni­ties to attack Zar­qawi and destroy his oper­a­tions in Iraqi Kur­dis­tan but didn’t do it.
“Peo­ple were more obsessed with devel­op­ing the coali­tion to over­throw Sad­dam than to exe­cute the president’s pol­icy of pre­emp­tion against ter­ror­ists,” accord­ing to ter­ror­ism expert and for­mer National Secu­rity Coun­cil mem­ber Roger Cressey.
Bush’s Ahab-like quest to invade Iraq has been proven time and again to be a fail­ure of mon­u­men­tal pro­por­tions with the real vic­tims the Iraqi peo­ple. And they know this. They grow angrier toward the United States with every attack. Not help­ing the mat­ter, Vice Pres­i­dent Dick Cheney again brushed off yesterday’s attacks as a sign of “des­per­a­tion.“
“What it is more than any­thing else is major des­per­a­tion on [the insur­gents’] part, as we get closer and closer to stand­ing up a new gov­ern­ment in Iraq,” Cheney told MSNBC yes­ter­day. He also pointed to a “fairly sig­nif­i­cant decline in Amer­i­can casu­al­ties in the last cou­ple of months.“
I’m sure the Iraqis are pleased the num­ber of Amer­i­can deaths has declined. (More or less true; Feb­ru­ary saw 20 Amer­i­can deaths instead of January’s 47.) But here’s some­thing to pon­der. Since Sept. 11, 2001, al Qaeda and its pos­si­ble affil­i­ates such as Ansar have killed almost 1,200 peo­ple, accord­ing to an NBC News analy­sis.
Iraqis are the sin­gle largest nation­al­ity killed in ter­ror­ist attacks. Before yesterday’s attacks, 593 Iraqis have died since August 2003 in more than 40 attacks. If al Qaeda or Ansar al-Islam is shown to be behind the Bagh­dad and Kar­bala attacks, at least 738 Iraqis will have been killed, well over half of the world­wide total al Qaeda death toll.
The num­ber of Amer­i­cans killed by al Qaeda since the World Trade Cen­ter attacks? 25.