Meanwhile, in Iraq

500 dead, and climbing:

The death toll in the suicide bombings Tuesday in northern Iraq has risen to at least 500, local officials in Nineveh province said Wednesday.

A girl wounded in the Tuesday attacks in northern Iraq arrives at a hospital in Dahuk, Iraq, on Wednesday.

1 of 2 Iraqi Army and Mosul police sources earlier put the number at 260, but said it was likely to rise. 320 were reported wounded.

But it's not about the Iraqi people; they are merely pawns on a chessboard. It is, instead, and of course, all about America:

The Tuesday truck bombs that targeted the villages of Qahtaniya, al-Jazeera and Tal Uzair, in northern Iraq near the border with Syria, were a "trademark al Qaeda event" designed to sway U.S. public opinion against the war, a U.S. general said Wednesday.

The attacks, targeting Kurdish villages of the Yazidi religious minority, were attempts to "break the will" of the American people and show that the U.S. troop escalation -- the "surge" -- is failing, Maj. Gen. Benjamin Mixon said.

You have to think about the cause and effect relationship there to truly understand this. The surge isn't failing because 500 people were killed in a single event. This was simply calculated to make ordinary Americans think the surge is failing. But we should not be fooled. The terrorists are only trying to win hearts and minds by killing foreigners we don't seem to really care about anyway; or something. Maybe it depends on who the terrorists were this time:

"We still have a great deal of work to do against al Qaeda in Iraq, and we have great deal of work to do against al Qaeda networks in northern Iraq," Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, a Multi-National Force-Iraq spokesman, said Wednesday.

The office of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki blamed Sunni extremists for the "monstrous crime." He said a committee has been formed to investigate.

Or what they were up to:

"This is an act of ethnic cleansing, if you will -- almost genocide when you consider the fact the target they attacked and the fact that these Yazidis, out in a very remote part of Nineveh province, where there is very little security and really no security required to this point," Mixon said.

Which means they cleverly found a place where the surge wasn't working, in order to fool Americans into thinking it was working, by an act of ethnic cleansing or genocide which Americans won't really understand (how many Americans can identify a Sunni from a Shi'ite on sight, or even explain the difference, or even know there is a difference?) but which is still aimed at breaking their will to go on to victory in Iraq, which will look like....? Well, they'll get back to us on that one.

Of course, it could have something to do with this:

The Yazidi sect is a mainly Kurdish minority, an ancient group that worships seven angels, in the form of peacocks, who are subordinate to the supreme god who created the universe.

A couple of related incidents in the spring highlighted the tensions between Sunnis and Yazidis.

In April, a Kurdish Yazidi teenage girl was brutally beaten, kicked and stoned to death in northern Iraq by other Yazidis in what authorities said was an "honor killing" after she was seen with a Sunni Muslim man. Although she had not married him or converted, her attackers believed she had.

The Yazidis condemn mixing with people of another faith.

That killing is said to have spurred the killings of about two dozen Yazidi men by Sunni Muslims in the Mosul area two weeks later.

Attackers affiliated with al Qaeda pulled 24 Yazidi men out of a bus and slaughtered them, according to a provincial official.

Certainly makes more sense than: "Let's kill lots of people the Americans have never heard of in some place besides Baghdad! That'll convince 'em to withdraw!"