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Many of us ask how there can be so many suicide bombings in Iraq. It turns out that there is quite a bit Iraq can do to reduce the number of such incidents:
By contrast, no suicide bomber in Israel has managed to kill more than six people in a single blast for well over a year.
Iraq's vulnerability to such attacks was exposed again on Monday when two bombers dressed as senior police officers walked through the main checkpoint of the Interior Ministry compound in Baghdad and killed 28 people.
With the U.S. ambassador at a nearby police ceremony, security should have been solid, but al Qaeda, which claimed responsibility, said the bombers evaded nine checkpoints.
They also got hold of high-level security passes that enabled them to get inside the compound and would have admitted them to the ministry building itself.
It is hard to imagine such a security breach in Israel.
"The system here for going after these groups is much more effective than in Iraq," said Assaf Heffetz, a former Israeli police chief and counter-terrorism expert. "Public safety measures are also not as good there, for example at shopping centers. That is what makes the difference."
...The target of last week's Ramadi bomb was a line of around 1,000 men queuing for jobs at a police recruiting station.
Western security experts say they are amazed police even considered gathering so many obvious targets together in one place, particularly in a city as dangerous as Ramadi.
They said recruitment should have been staggered over several days to keep crowd numbers down, and those wanting to join the queue should have been filtered through a checkpoint and searched one by one.
The conduct of Iraqi police and soldiers at checkpoints has also been criticized. They sometimes stand together chatting -- easy prey for a bomber on foot or in a car -- rather than remaining spaced out as is standard military practice.
...While analysts say the U.S. and Iraqi authorities can do more to bring death tolls down, for example by redesigning checkpoints and using random stop-and-search techniques, a change of attitude is needed from ordinary Iraqis too.
In the event that the Iraqis get their security act together, the number of suicide bombings will be reduced.
