On the February 12 edition of ABC's Good Morning America, co-anchor Chris Cuomo asserted that “the bombing of a Shiite shrine touched off the sectarian bloodletting” in Iraq. Referring to the February 2006 bombing -- reportedly by Al Qaeda -- of the prominent Al Askariya Shiite mosque in Samarra, Iraq, Cuomo echoed numerous claims from high-level Bush administration officials, including President Bush himself, that the Samarra mosque bombing set off what Bush called “a vicious cycle of sectarian violence that continues today.” In fact, as Media Matters for America has documented, while the situation in Iraq has significantly worsened since the Samarra mosque bombing, sectarian violence throughout Iraq before the incident was already substantial and rising.

At the beginning of Bush's January 10 speech to the nation outlining his “New Way Forward” in Iraq, Bush presented the following account of recent events in Iraq:

BUSH: When I addressed you just over a year ago, nearly 12 million Iraqis had cast their ballots for a unified and democratic nation. The elections of 2005 were a stunning achievement. We thought that these elections would bring the Iraqis together, and that as we trained Iraqi security forces we could accomplish our mission with fewer American troops.

But in 2006, the opposite happened. The violence in Iraq -- particularly in Baghdad -- overwhelmed the political gains the Iraqis had made. Al Qaeda terrorists and Sunni insurgents recognized the mortal danger that Iraq's elections posed for their cause, and they responded with outrageous acts of murder aimed at innocent Iraqis. They blew up one of the holiest shrines in Shia Islam -- the Golden Mosque of Samarra -- in a calculated effort to provoke Iraq's Shia population to retaliate. Their strategy worked. Radical Shia elements, some supported by Iran, formed death squads. And the result was a vicious cycle of sectarian violence that continues today.

McClatchy Newspapers noted on January 14 that Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and national security adviser Stephen Hadley have subsequently “recited Bush's history of” the sectarian violence in various public appearances.

However, as McClatchy reported, “the country already had been on a trajectory of rising sectarian violence. U.S. diplomats, reporters and military and intelligence officers began reporting that Shiite death squads were targeting Sunni clerics and former officials of Saddam Hussein's Sunni regime at least 15 months before the Samarra bombing.”

Media Matters also noted numerous facts that contradict Bush's suggestion that that U.S. efforts in Iraq were succeeding up until shortly after the December 2005 Iraqi elections when New York Times columnist David Brooks asserted that Bush's depiction of events leading to the Samarra bombing “was the accurate, right description.”

From the February 12 edition of ABC's Good Morning America:

CUOMO: We begin in Iraq, where today marks one year since the bombing of a Shiite shrine touched off the sectarian bloodletting. Just this morning, a massive bomb went off as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was speaking about Baghdad becoming safer. Nearly 70 people were killed.