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*** I just finally saw JD Johannes' first Iraq documentary, "Outside the Wire," and it was great. Order it here. I also enjoyed this rough clip from his last trip: go here and scroll down to "Mu, mu, mu jihad."

*** Major attacks decline by nearly 50% since the surge. There's no doubt the new security strategy and awakenings are having a dramatic effect, though seasonality is a consideration.

*** Matt Sanchez ambushed in Sadr City! Heh.

*** And finally, Spiegel(!) publishes an account of complicated progress in Iraq:

Ramadi is an irritating contradiction of almost everything the world thinks it knows about Iraq -- it is proof that the US military is more successful than the world wants to believe. Ramadi demonstrates that large parts of Iraq -- not just Anbar Province, but also many other rural areas along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers -- are essentially pacified today. This is news the world doesn't hear: Ramadi, long a hotbed of unrest, a city that once formed the southwestern tip of the notorious "Sunni Triangle," is now telling a different story, a story of Americans who came here as liberators, became hated occupiers and are now the protectors of Iraqi reconstruction.

This sentiment has been previously highlighted by Yon and INDC: "Changing Attitudes." More from Spiegel:

The world has become deaf to the word "peace" -- at least when conversations turn to Iraq. It is as if the world were blind to the possibility that the situation in this country straddling the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers could be anything different from the constant stream of increasingly devastating films of the latest car bombings. For most people, Iraq has become nothing but a series of attacks, a collection of images of bombings and victims, a tale of failure, a book about historical guilt and a symbol of the moral decline of the United States of America.

But the real story in Iraq cannot be summed up in short news clips and quick, shaky television images. Body counts and names of the dead tell only part of the story of Iraq today. Research for this story took me on a three-week journey throughout the country, my fourth trip to Iraq in as many years. Under the protection of the US military, it led us to the northern city of Mosul and its suburbs, to Ramadi and to Baghdad. The military did not choose our destinations, SPIEGEL did. Apart from a few technical and strategic details, nothing was censored.

Read the rest.

Via Mediencritik, who has more.

HA also has more.

Posted by Bill at August 14, 2007 09:41 AM | TrackBack (0)