There still aren't nearly enough cops in Iraq to protect Iraqi citizens, or even to direct traffic, but Peter Maass reports this in The New York Times:

I was at the Oil Ministry on Thursday and noticed a convoy of a Bradley fighting vehicle and several armored Humvees with .50-caliber machine guns. They were escorting an S.U.V. with two civilians who work for KBR, an American oil-services company.

That's how the Americans who are supposed to fix Iraq travel around — in cumbersome convoys insulating them from the people they are supposed to help.


Lovely.