The heart of the insurgency may be al-Anbar, but the real fighting is for Baghdad. The city is an important symbol, in much the same way that control of Paris symbolizes control of France.
Insurgents cannot hope to control Baghdad, so they try to show that the Iraqi government can't control it either. Today's attack at a sewage treatment plant did nothing to disrupt the function of the plant, but that is cold comfort to the families of thirty five children killed by car bombs.
The insurgents can't afford photographs of American soldiers passing out candy to smiling children, but the only way they can stop it is with photographs of American soldiers caring for children ripped open by the insurgents' bombs, and US helicopters rushing them to the hospital. This is the fullness of their power: they can kill children to protest that the US is cleaning up Baghdad's sewage.
One would think the monstrosity of these attacks would speak for itself, but it does not. The AP report shows only too clearly the moral blindness afflicting so many:
The day of violence across Iraq, including insurgent attacks and U.S. airstrikes in Fallujah, left a total of 46 people dead and 208 wounded.There we are then: the insurgents and the United States are equally the enemies of peaceful Iraqis. An insurgent attack on a sewage treatment plant designed to slaughter unarmed people en masse ought, of course, to be lumped in with an airstrike on a terrorist safehouse that was packed so full of ordinance that secondary explosions continued for hours.
Naturally.
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