LETS MAKE THIS VERY CLEAR

It is Arabs standing between Iraq and progress. Arabs and only Arabs.

Spin it any way you want...that is the unavoidable conclusion.

As another relief agency closed its doors in the capital this week, a group of Iraqis and Americans in this city 100 miles southeast of Baghdad poured concrete for the foundation of another elementary school.

The moment was not just a measure of the progress that has been made to rebuild this run-down provincial capital but also, increasingly, of what is going undone in Baghdad and in the embattled cities of central Iraq.

While a wave of attacks in and around the capital has either chased relief workers out of town or behind high walls, in much of the rest of the country, the huge American-led reconstruction effort is rolling forward.

The result, increasingly, is a two-tiered rebuilding effort, one proceeding with ease across the south and large sections of the north, and the other, in the so-called Sunni Triangle in central Iraq moving forward with great difficulty.