John McCain explains how some of the neighborhoods in Baghdad are safe enough to walk around at night without body armor, Kevlar, weapons, armored humvees, and accompanying security detail. Joe Lieberman agrees. The resistance disagrees. The Shia disagree.

Senator Lieberman (R-Tel Aviv) may have a point that the troops feel more confident in the Baghdad streets. Many reports indicate that the Mahdi Army of Moqtada al-Sadr has gone to ground and this means that some of the daily danger might be temporarily postponed. These reports indicate al-Sadr is waiting to see just what the Petraeus strategy of a mini-Maginot Line in Sadr City looks like when it is finished.

The series of fortified stations, garrisoned with US and Iraqi troops, are planned to be local points of order, fortified patrol bases from which to conduct continuing forays into the surrounding neighborhood in order to maintain contact with citizens, and develop confidence in the national government’s ability to maintain social order. A vague analogy might something like community police patrolling in the US, but with machine guns, armored cars, and artillery and air support on three minute call.

This is the plan that GEN David Petraeus came up with in response to Mr Kagan’s demand for an escalation in Iraq in order to make the occupation look like it’s working.

But I don’t think it’s sensible to consider this a final solution. So far, only one of the five brigades has been deployed in Iraq. The other four won’t be fully deployed until sometime this summer.

It appears that historically the greatest resistance to the US occupation of Iraq has come from the “insurgents,” that vague category of perhaps 30 to 40% of the population that includes the Sunni religious minority, Ba’athist Party members, former members of the Iraqi Army, the adherents of al-Qaeda (certainly less than 500) and “foreign fighters” (probably less than 50) and a lot of Iraqis who probably just resent the occupation. There are undoubtedly some Shia in this grouping, since many of that sect don’t consider al-Sadr their leader.

While the US concentrates on fortifying a part of Iraq that hasn’t been overly violent, the killing goes on elsewhere. The first impression is that locking down Sadr City hasn’t reduced the sectarian killing in other parts of the country.