Surging Delegitimization

The Baghdad Security Plan has only produced a surge in de-legitimization of the national government and its ability to carry out its positive promises of action. At my old blog, I noted that the Jaish al Mahdi was lying low in Baghdad and I speculated on a reasons why it may have been doing so:

There is a possibility that the JAM and Sadr are lying low for two reasons.... a deeper political objective of demonstrating that the only reliable protector of Shi'ites in Baghdad is the JAM as the central government troops and the US Army can not protect the Shi'ite dominated neighborhoods. [emphasis added today by me]

John Robb at Global Guerrillas has a chilling post that validates my interpretation of the delegitimizating effects of the security plan:

Down with Maliki! Where is the security plan? We are not protected by this plan. [italics in original]
Shouts from an angry Shiite mob as they threw stones at the US and Iraqi troops that arrived at the scene of one of the 5 car-bombings that killed 160 people in Baghdad on 18 April 2007

Chaos and destruction are much easier acts and states of being to commit and exist in than order and construction. The insurgencies in Iraq have made the word of the Iraqi government and the US increasingly incredible over the past four years, and this loss of credibility is destroying any fragment of an iota of a chance of improvement in either the general condition of Iraq under the governance of a US backed regime or at least a quasi-functional non-genocidal counterinsurgency program designed to support the US backed regime.