Informed Consent:

Guerrillas deployed a roadside bomb to kill the police chief of Hilla, a largely Shiite city south of Baghdad.

AP reports that "Religious vigilantes have killed at least 40 women this year in the southern Iraqi city of Basra because of how they dressed, their mutilated bodies found with notes warning against "violating Islamic teachings . . ."

One of the problems with how the US press tends to cover Iraq is that they often leave out the Shiite south because there are few US troops down there, apparently assuming that it is relatively stable. Not.

Ned Parker of the LA Times writes that Iraq has not been so much pacified as Balkanized.