The downturn in violence ends as Iraq erupts!

The office of Iraqi Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi was hit in a mortar or rocket strike on Baghdad's Green Zone government and diplomatic compound on Friday, and a security guard was killed, an official in his office said.

The Green Zone houses the U.S. Embassy and much of the Iraqi government. It has come under fire with regularity since Easter Sunday. No other information was immediately available.

Meantime, U.S. forces were drawn deeper into Iraq's four day-old crackdown on Shiite militants on Friday, launching air strikes in Basra for the first time and battling militants in Baghdad.

The fighting has exposed a deep rift within Iraq's majority Shiite community and put pressure on Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whose forces have failed to dislodge fighters loyal to cleric Muqtada al-Sadr from the country's second-largest city.

Iraqi authorities shut down Baghdad with a strict curfew on Friday. Lawmakers, including those loyal to al-Sadr, met to seek an end to the impasse.

The government says it is fighting "outlaws," but al-Sadr's followers say political parties in al-Maliki's Shiite-led government are using military force to marginalize their rivals ahead of local elections due by October.

This will only get worse.

And what is America's response gong to be? We do not have the manpower to send even more troops into the zone, and the more we get entrenched in a battle against the forces of al Sadr the more Iraqi support we lose until the whole country becomes the enemy.

Are we really going to send young Americans to kill Shiite Iraqi citizens? And how does the administration spin that into being a fight against "terrorists"?

I think the only person who may be suffering more then Bush (aside from the Iraqi people of course), is John McCain. The much vaunted success of the surge has now exploded in death and violence. McCain's Presidential aspirations may well become a casualty of this violence as well.