Exerpt from an NPR interview. Between banning Baath Party people, militias running the hospitals and anyone with any brains leaving the country there isn't much left in the way of medical care.

"TG: So hospitals are run by militias?

"JT: Absolutely! The Ministry of Health is run by people who work for Muqtada al Sadr. He, in his way, is trying to do what Hezbollah and Hamas have done by taking over the provision of essential services like health. It’s actually quite telling that even the main hospital in Sadr City, which is his big stronghold, doesn’t even have the proper level of service and care that hospitals should have.

"TG: It sounds like one of the reasons why doctors fled is that doctors have become targets? Why are doctors targeted?

"JT: For any number of reasons. Maybe they were members of the Baath party. A lot of people were members of the Baath party to get a job."

"TG: …You were talking about how there were sometimes four hours of electricity there. What about water? What about food?

"JT: Water gets trucked in. Water tankers. People have to wait for a truck to bring water into the neighborhood and they have to pay for it. If you don’t have the means to pay… Right now, especially in the summer, it gets so hot in Baghdad. So if you don’t have electricity, you can’t work your air conditioning, you can’t work your fridge. You’ve got so many kids, especially, who get sick. There’s cholera. There’s all sorts of illnesses that come from water…

"TG: Dysentery…

"JT: Absolutely. But there’s so much going on that the way the water shortages show themselves is how sick the children get. Just in my area, a man who lives a couple of houses down from me came up to me and asked me if I would see his baby. He’s got a one-year-old who has some sort of heart failure and he can’t get treatment for him at the hospital that he goes to in Baghdad because they simply don’t have the doctors to do it. Because there’s been such a brain drain in Iraq. All of the doctors who have been threatened or have seen their colleagues killed have left. The hospitals themselves are in a really bad state. Dirty sheets. Dirty floors. Some people just choose to die at home rather than go to the hospital because it’s so bad. There’s other things. If he’s a Shia, he doesn’t want to go to a hospital in an area that’s Sunni or that’s run by a Sunni group. If he’s a Sunni, he doesn’t want to go to an area run by a Shia militia. So where do you go?"

What Petraeus is proving is that if one stations a squad of soldiers at every intersection and arrests all males between the ages of 14 and 60 one can move the violence to another area.

What Bush has proven is that politicians can then call that evidence of "stability".

Arf