Events both on the battlefield and at home in 2006 finally forced Bush to permit a long-overdue reassessment of Iraq policy and ultimately drove him to shift course. In Iraq the violence took a turn for the worse; in Washington pressure mounted to reconsider a situation that even backers of the war agreed was slipping out of control. The president received a stinging rebuke in the midterm elections that cost his party control of both houses of Congress. Soon afterward, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group issued its report, which in effect acknowledged the failure of the American war effort. Bush dug in his heels, however. Against the advice of both the ISG and the Joint Chiefs, he embraced a proposal to increase temporarily the number of American troops in Iraq to tamp down the violence. The decision marked his single hands-on intervention in the direction of the conflict.
A terrorist bomb attack on February 22, 2006, that destroyed the Askariya Mosque in Samarra, one of the holiest Shiite shrines, led to reprisal attacks on Sunni mosques in Baghdad and triggered an escalation in sectarian conflict across Iraq. In the months that followed, attacks reached an all-time high, surpassing 3,000 per week. Each morning in Baghdad bodies turned up by the dozens, victims of militias, gangs, or—worse from the American perspective—government security forces. American officials reported that the killers had been “dressed in police uniforms,” but Sunni neighborhoods knew better: the killers were the police. Mixed Sunni-Shia neighborhoods experienced a process that resembled the Balkan “ethnic cleansing” of the previous decade. Meanwhile, the Iraqi government under Prime Minister Maliki refused to move against Shiite militias, ignoring American calls for even-handedness. Hope for political reconciliation evaporated. U.S. troops, often assaulted by both sides, suffered mounting casualties.
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