First, a summary of a roundtable on a recent Iraqi religious conference:

The conference resulted in an Accord calling upon mutual support, tolerance, and unity of the Iraqi people around the free expression of faith and the mutual protection of holy sites. It also renounces violence and appeals to rule of law and Government structure to solve Iraqi problems. It's a pretty comprehensive Accord considering the audience that agreed and wrote it; a major accomplishment as a step forward for GOI. In the chaplain's estimation, this may be a contributing factor to holding down violent outbreaks in the wake of the mosque attacks.

Read the whole thing.

And Grim offers some advice in another post:

Every American has a right to comment on the war. If you're going to avail yourself of that right, however, make an effort to learn something about military science and history, so you can understand and engage the discussion.

Our military men want nothing more than for you to get what they're trying to accomplish. No military has ever gone to the lengths ours has done to try and help you understand their mission.

Reducing their plan to "?" is the mark of a mind that simply doesn't want to understand.

Again, read the whole thing.

"An artist uses her gifts to preserve the memories of fallen troops."

(Via DW)

I'm pretty surprised that this report came from the BBC.

An interesting assertion by Dave Schuler.

The comments are also interesting.

Roggio and Elliot report on the massive ongoing operations.

Big things afoot around Baghdad.

U.S. troops backed by helicopters and Bradley Fighting Vehicles launched a major offensive Tuesday to clear the Sunni extremist group al-Qaeda in Iraq from its new stronghold in Diyala Province north of the capital, the U.S. military said in a statement.
...
The Diyala offensive involves about 10,000 U.S. soldiers, making it one of the largest military operations since the Iraq war began more than four years ago. The operation, code-named Arrowhead Ripper, is focused in the area around Baqouba, the capital of Diyala, a mixed Shiite-Sunni area that in recent months has become one of the most violent regions in Iraq.

The offensive began under cover of darkness "with a quick-strike nighttime air assault" by the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, the military statement said. "By daylight, attack helicopters and ground forces had engaged and killed 22 anti-Iraqi forces in and around Baqouba," it said.

There were no reports of U.S. casualties.

The statement said that the operation was "a large scale effort to eliminate al-Qaeda in Iraq terrorists operating in Baqouba and its surrounding areas."
...
In recent months, it has been put on the run in Anbar province west of Baghdad, a vast desert and Sunni area that was the organization's stronghold. But it alienated Sunni tribesmen, who turned against al-Qaeda and helped U.S. and Iraqi forces drive the group east into Diyala.

At the same time, the addition of a 28,500-soldier troop build-up in Baghdad, which was competed last week, also helped push al-Qaeda north out of the capital. The U.S. military strategy now seems aimed at keeping the group in the Diyala area while troops attack the organization's safe houses, bomb factories, prisons and other outposts.

The U.S. military is also strengthening its operations in the suburban belt south of Baghdad, where U.S. officials say that Sunni insurgents have established car bomb factories that fuel the daily bloodshed in the capital. The U.S. military reported Monday that fighter jets on Saturday dropped four "precision-guided bombs" in the Arab Jubour area south of the capital while 1,200 soldiers maneuvered to prevent insurgents from entering Baghdad.

Read the rest, and also check out Roggio and Elliot's succinct report, appropriately dubbing the operation "The Battle of the Belts."

Also see Michael Yon's dispatch:

This campaign is actually a series of carefully orchestrated battalion and brigade sized battles. Collectively, it is probably the largest battle since "major hostilities" ended more than four years ago. Even the media here on the ground do not seem to have sensed its scale.
...
In the short time since Petraeus took charge here, Anbar Province - "Anbar the Impossible" - seems to have made a remarkable turnaround. I just spent about a month out there and saw no combat. I have never gone that long in Iraq without seeing combat. Clearly, some areas of Anbar remain dangerous - there is fighting in Fallujah today - but there is also something in Anbar today that hasn't been seen in recent memory: possibilities.There are also larger realities lurking up on the Turkish borders, but the reality today is that the patient called Iraq will die and become a home for Al Qaeda if we leave now.

But now the AQ cancer is spreading into Diyala Province, straight along the Diyala River into Baghdad and other places. "Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia" (AQM) apparently now a subgroup of ISI (the Islamic State of Iraq), has staked Baquba as the capital of their Caliphate. Whatever the nom de jour of their nom de guerre, Baquba has been claimed for their capital.

Read the rest.

Bill Roggio:

Left without its base of Ramadi, which was once the most dangerous city in Iraq, al Qaeda and its allies moved eastward and attempted to reestablish operation in the Fallujah region. Al Qaeda was already entrenched in the Amiriyah, Zaidon and Karma areas. Violence in the cities and towns surrounding Fallujah increased in late 2006 as al Qaeda attempted to halt the spread of the Awakening movement in the eastern portion of the province.

The Fourth Rail recently interviewed Colonel Richard Simcock, the Commander of Regimental Combat Team Six (RCT-6), the Marine regiment in charge of Fallujah and the regions of eastern Anbar province, know as AO Raleigh (Area of Operations Raleigh).

AO Raleigh includes Fallujah proper, Amiriyah and Ferris to the southeast, Zaidon to the east, Karma to the northeast and Saqlawiyah to the northwest. The city of Fallujah is the only city in Anbar province where the Iraqi Army owns the battlespace. The city is run by Iraqis, and has an elected mayor, 20 members on the city council and a police force the works closely with the Iraqi Army and U.S. forces in the region. Fallujah now has an estimated 400,000 residents as people continue to return to the city, and business is beginning to thrive, Col Simcock noted.

Col Simcock credits the success in Fallujah to three factors: the improvements local governance and the development of the security forces, tribal engagement and having the forces available to conduct permanent presence missions throughout the region. "Regimental Combat Team Six has more forces than any of the prior regimental combat teams serving in AO Raleigh," he noted. "It has enabled me to go into more places in AO Raleigh than my predecessors were able to do."

Alpha Company AAV crew chief saves one of his fellow crewmen:

About this time, Kim said, he heard the "pop-pop-pop" staccato of rifle fire. After Kim had moved from his position in one of the forward seats of the vehicle, Vogel turned his turret in order to get a better view down into the troop compartment.

"That's when I heard rounds pinging off the vehicle," said Vogel. "I turned my turret to shine my spotlight, and I saw five guys on the berm. We were returning fire."

Due to the location of the amputation, Kim couldn't get a good fix on the tourniquet. The only significant light in the cabin was the green light of one of the digital displays in the compartment flickering on and off.

"I couldn't see if I got the tourniquet on. He was fading in and out of consciousness, and I would tighten down the tourniquet to make him wake up. I didn’t want to do it because I know it hurt him, but I had to," said Kim.

While one of Kim's hands applied pressure with the tourniquet, the other was digging into the combat lifesaver bag. He pulled out a field dressing and ripped it open.

Read the whole thing.

For more on the AAV mission around Fallujah, see here.

I've been pretty sick of political wrangling for some time now, lost even more patience for it when I went to Iraq, and do not subscribe to the belief that military commanders are immune to criticism. That all said, this statement is astounding:

Sen. Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) charged that Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, who took command in Iraq four months ago, "isn't in touch with what's going on in Baghdad."

Harry Reid considers himself more "in touch with what's going on in Baghdad" than Petraeus? Beyond the mindblowing, bizarro hubris of such an assertion, this comment is made sinister or incompetent by the fact that Reid misrepresents the meaning of Petraeus's comments:

Reid seemed most provoked by an article in yesterday's edition of USA Today, which quoted the general as saying that he sees "astonishing signs of normalcy" in the Iraqi capital. "I'm talking about professional soccer leagues with real grass field stadiums, several amusement parks -- big ones, markets that are very vibrant," Petraeus told the newspaper.

Why does Reid find these comments false?

The general's comments came on the same day that the Pentagon released to Congress a quarterly report on security in Iraq. It said that the three-month-old U.S. counteroffensive in Baghdad has not curtailed overall violence in the country but has instead shifted it from inside the Iraqi capital to places around it.

"I was a little disappointed, to say the least, today reading the USA Today newspaper, where he's saying things are going fine," Reid told reporters at a Capitol Hill news conference.

A. Petraeus was talking about Baghdad proper, which has indeed earned a bit of a breather as much insurgent activity has shifted to areas immediately surrounding the capital.

B. Petraeus was "astonish[ed at] signs of normalcy" because of the conditionally noted violence surrounding (in both time and now close geography) said normalcy.

C. Petraeus hasn't sugarcoated (much) his carefully equivocal reports, making it a point to set realistic expectations and place the focus on the Iraqi political process.

Compounding Senator Reid's latest attack is the fact that he's declared the Surge a failure ... days before the deployment of troops to support the strategy (much less the strategy itself) was completed.

Whether his aggressive stance winds up validated by unwritten events or not, his timing is objectively incorrect. On intellectual, political and nakedly cynical grounds, Senator Reid is a disgrace.

UPDATE: These photos underscore the point.

(Via HA)

UPDATE: Original text slightly edited (stylistic tweaks).

Flea highlights a Military.com story on the use of EA-6B Prowlers in IED jamming ops in Afghanistan, noting:

More remarkable than this, however, is how long Military.com - and their sister site, DefenseTech.org - have known about the story and sat on it.*

And:

You have to hand it to the Americans. It is impressive to have so important an asset in theatre and have so few people know about it. (cough)Camp Mirage(cough) (cough)

I somewhat endorse the first statement. The end-state in the second is probably less impressive than random.

Marines in Iraq told me to keep hush-hush about a related technology that accomplishes the same task as the Prowlers. I immediately went and googled a report from a tech magazine (a la, but not, Popular Mechanics), that detailed the model and operation of the technology, including exposition of their weak points and counterstrategies, all presented in a tone of dispassionate analysis. I forwarded the article to a Marine who became a proper mix of pissed and horrified. This technology is commonly discussed on the web (in mainstream outlets) to varying degree, in articles several years old. The tactic is widely understood by insurgents, who have moved on to new tricks (some of which are still legitimately classified). The fact that military.com withheld similar information is indeed odd and to their credit, though I suspect it wasn't terribly newsworthy, and therefore less tempting. On the whole, media has but one goal, and that is to reveal information, consequences be damned.

I was also told that I couldn't report on the Explosive Ordinance Disposal robots that grab suspected IEDs and put them in a safe place to be detonated. I thought that was a bit much, but wasn't bothered by complying with the request. But after arriving back in the States, I saw an EOD robot in a stylized Army recruiting commercial broadcast on national television, in addition to seeing them in dozens of other places in various media.

Cats quickly claw their way out of bags, these days.

The key graph in this Strategy Page analysis:

Corruption and lack of civic spirit continue to be the biggest problems in Iraq. This sort of thing does not make loud noises, so does not get into the mass media much. But what is done about corruption, will have more to do with Iraqs future, than the battle with terrorists.

In the WSJ:

War being what it is, the images of Iraq that come America's way are of car bombs and daily explosions. Missing from the coverage are the great, subtle changes our country is undergoing, the birth of new national ideas and values which will in the end impose themselves despite the death and destruction that the terrorists have been hell-bent on inflicting on us. Those who endured the brutality of the former regime, those who saw the outside world avert its gaze from their troubles, know the magnitude of the change that has come to Iraq. A fundamental struggle is being fought on Iraqi soil between those who believe that Iraqis, after a long nightmare, can retrieve their dignity and freedom, and others who think that oppression is the order of things and that Iraqis are doomed to a political culture of terror, prisons and mass graves. Some of our neighbors have made this struggle more lethal still, they have placed their bets on the forces of terror in pursuit of their own interests.

Hard to disagree with that. The devil is in the details with this, however:

Before us lies a difficult road--the imperative of national reconciliation, the drafting of a new social contract that acknowledges the diversity of our country. It was in that spirit that those who drafted our constitution made provisions for amending it. The opponents of the constitution were a minority, but we sought for our new political life the widest possible measure of consensus. From the outset, I committed myself to the principle of reconciliation, pledged myself to its success. I was determined to review and amend many provisions and laws passed in the aftermath of the fall of the old regime, among them the law governing de-Baathification. I aimed to find the proper balance between those who opposed the decrees on de-Baathification and others who had been victims of the Baath Party. This has not been easy, but we have stuck to that difficult task.

And the details are equivocal, to put it euphemistically.

Tempered with some mixed to potentially bad news from Anbar.

Slate features an excellent slideshow of D-Day photographs.

Badgers Forward:

Last fall there was virtually no government here and the report that was ballyhooed as an admission of failure, had every reason to be perceived as accurate.

And then things changed.

Read the rest.

UPDATE: And, commenting on a dire New York Times' assessment of the Surge in Baghdad, Bill Roggio offers up a recent history lesson:

The leaked memo on the status of the Baghdad Security Plan is reminiscent of the report on the status of Anbar province that was leaked to the Washington Post in the fall of 2006. "The U.S. military is no longer able to defeat a bloody insurgency in western Iraq or counter al-Qaeda's rising popularity there, according to newly disclosed details from a classified Marine Corps intelligence report that set off debate in recent months about the military's mission in Anbar province," the Washington Post reported. In other words, Anbar province was hopelessly lost.

Anbar province was hotly contested at the time. Al Qaeda was on the rise and a political solution seemed beyond reach. But the Post failed to note the rise of the Anbar Salvation Council. Last November, I warned that it was too soon to judge the situation in Anbar. Six months later, the security situation in huge swaths of Anbar province, including Ramadi, once the most violent city in Iraq, had seen a dramatic turnaround. And now the Anbar counterinsurgency is cited as a model success story.

In an interview last week, LTG Odierno explained why it's difficult to judge progress in the midst of a complex counterinsurgency operation. "Now, I explain to my commanders and my soldiers when I talk to them, it's kind of like a teeter-totter; you work your way up the teeter-totter, and when you go past the tipping point, it happens very quickly, and we've seen that out in Anbar. We're still going up that teeter-totter, and I'm not sure how long it's going to take us to get to that tipping point or if I believe or assess that we can't get to that tipping point."

Read the conclusion.

This line from JD Johannes about the Iraqi Security Forces made me laugh:

But, inshalla, the PSF and IP will catch the guy. Sometimes they operate for 96 hours straight catching known AQIZ operatives. Other times they can't be moved for anything other than tea, cigarettes and Maxim Magazines.

In other news, Johannes recently had an awfully close-call. Thankfully he's ok.