I'm off to Kuwait tomorrow, followed by a brief stop in Baghdad and then Fallujah. "Space Available" military travel could take 2-4 days, so expect posting from Iraq to start early next week.

UPDATE (9/3, 10:31 AM Eastern US, 6:32 Baghdad): I'm in Baghdad, having run the "Summer Space-A Military Travel Endurance Gauntlet" and emerged victorious, if damaged. Back in January the process was slow and annoying, but eminently tolerable.

Add toting around 100+ lbs. of gear in 110-120 degrees to the mix, and you've got something closer to casual torture by mischievous gods. The intricate bureaucratic insanities, face-melting heat and apathetic contractors form the perfect storm of bad travel.

"No sleeping!" in the air-conditioned MWR tent, whereas the air-conditioning in the billets is broken. Signs admonish travelers to remove bags and refrain from getting comfortable because "This tent is not a waiting room!", twenty feet from a sign reading ... "Waiting Room." A contractor tells a group of imploring travelers "I don't give a crap [where your passport is], the new company that starts today took my job", while many of the passports sit in a bin next to him. Best response from a soldier on his way out: "We're fellow Americans trying to get home, you should care."

This heat is more intense than anything I experienced growing up in Florida, and adds a whole new dimension to the war as you realize what Americans and Iraqis endure during summer seasons of the conflict. Walking in full E-Interceptor body armor and rifle plates makes one fuss and gripe until achieving the embarrassed relativism that you're not wearing it during an hours-long dismounted patrol through the streets of Baghdad. Most every day, for a 15-month deployment.

And getting assigned to bake in a tent with broken air-conditioning when you haven't slept in 24 hours is unwelcome news, but it pales in comparison to facing regular summer black-outs as an Iraqi living in Baghdad.

But the embed travel process had its inevitable highlight in the short Blackhawk ride from Baghdad International Airport to the Green Zone. This time, it was at night. A slight change in the engine's whine and your stomach's protest are the only warnings as the keyed up aircraft floats effortlessly into the air. Hot summer air buffets your face from the open window. The helicopter hugs the ground, skimming several hundred feet above neatly aligned palm groves and an industrial sector of the city, until the pilot ups speed and altitude as part of the anti-pattern pattern designed to discourage ground fire. A twin aircraft takes position 45 degrees to the left-rear, a moving blankness in the inky blue, half-moon-lit night. A mini black-out rolls over a few city blocks below, the lights snapping out and flickering back to life a few seconds later. Sharp banks alternate views of ground and sky, until the ride ends with the Blackhawk touching down like an insect on a leaf. God, I love that part.

I'm flying to Fallujah tonight to start a 3 day Civil Affairs embed early tomorrow morning. Pieces to follow.

UPDATE: Altitude edited for accuracy.

David Kilcullen writes a fascinating piece about the tribal awakenings in Iraq. For those unaware of Kilcullen's resume, see here.

A teaser:

The uprising began last year, far out in western Anbar province, but is now affecting about 40% of the country. It has spread to Ninewa, Diyala, Babil, Salah-ad-Din, Baghdad and - intriguingly - is filtering into Shi'a communities in the South. The Iraqi government was in on it from the start; our Iraqi intelligence colleagues predicted, well before we realized it, that Anbar was going to "flip", with tribal leaders turning toward the government and away from extremists.

Some tribal leaders told me that the split started over women. This is not as odd as it sounds. One of AQ's standard techniques, which I have seen them apply in places as diverse as Somalia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Indonesia, is to marry leaders and key operatives to women from prominent tribal families. The strategy works by creating a bond with the community, exploiting kinship-based alliances, and so "embedding" the AQ network into the society. Over time, this makes AQ part of the social landscape, allows them to manipulate local people and makes it harder for outsiders to pry the network apart from the population. (Last year, while working in the tribal agencies along Pakistan's North-West Frontier, a Khyber Rifles officer told me "we Punjabis are the foreigners here: al Qa'ida have been here 25 years and have married into the Pashtun hill-tribes to the point where it's hard to tell the terrorists from everyone else.") Well, indeed.

But this time, the tactic seems to have backfired.

Read the rest.

(Via DW)

I just received a review copy of "House to House: An Epic Memoir of War," by David Bellavia and John Bruning. Bellavia was awarded the Silver and Bronze Stars and nominated for the Distinguished Service Cross and the Medal of Honor for his actions in Fallujah. He is also a co-founder of Vets for Freedom, an organization which mobilizes "veterans to communicate America's strategic objectives in Iraq and Afghanistan." This looks like a great read.

An interview with Bellavia:

More here.

Read Michael Totten's latest dispatch describing the Iraqi Police in Mushadah. It's excellent.

*** Badger 6: "New glass is confidence."

(Via B5)

*** Teflon Don: "[W]hen a man from Tikrit named Saddam steps up to help Iraq ...

That's when I start to feel just a little bit of hope for this place."

*** Michael Yon: "And so, former insurgents showed up in Humvees, outnumbered us, and now were helping us find the bomb and bombers. A very strange world indeed."

All three links are well worth your time.

McClatchy Newspapers:

Iraqi insurgents taking cut of U.S. rebuilding money

Iraq's deadly insurgent groups have financed their war against U.S. troops in part with hundreds of thousands of dollars in U.S. rebuilding funds that they've extorted from Iraqi contractors in Anbar province.

I reported on this back in January:

Yusef: "From Fallujah to the city of Abu Ghraib, the radicals control everything. Gas stations, power, contracts and, believe it or not, contracts with the Americans themselves. The Americans give a contract to someone and the insurgents extort their share. This is how they finance their operations. An oil distribution facility in al-Anbar, believe it or not, half of its production goes to those radicals and to finance insurgency activities. A Fallujah judge doesn't dare to judge someone. He's too scared. He's been threatened and he has no power to protect himself."

INDC: So how did the insurgents take control of these contracts and the city functions?

Yusef: "They don't do the actual work. They come with money. They find the contractor. That contractor is an innocent person, he is not involved with anything and most all of them now, they are from Baghdad. Like there are some Fallujans, they do their contracts in Baghdad because it's too dangerous to be here, so most all contractors (coming to work in Fallujah) come from Baghdad. The contractor gets the contract, he shows up here in Fallujah to do the job. He starts planning, getting equipment. The insurgents find out about him, they show up, and they tell him, 'you know what, either we get a portion of that amount or you are not finishing it.'"

INDC: It's like the mafia in America.

Yusef: "Yes. So what choice does the contractor have? He's going to be killed anyway, so he's going to accept that deal. He's going to finish the contract, take half the money, and give the insurgent the other half."

This is where counterinsurgency gets confusing in Iraq. Corruption is such a cultural standard that "law & order" can only seek to mitigate it and keep resources out of the hands of the insurgency. One marine regarded part of his job as "separating the good-bad guys from the bad-bad guys." And beyond corruption, straight-up robbery and extortion are other persistent destabilizers, sometimes tied to violent insurgents, sometimes not.

Why is this problem so difficult for Americans to address? The Iraqis won't give up the names of the criminals:

INDC: I interviewed a Fallujan [civil servant] and he said the insurgents control most of the contracts in the area - some guy comes here to do a contract, even an American contract. They show up, get supplies together, and insurgents show up and say, "Guess what? You're gonna give us half your money or we're going to kill you." Do you agree that that's happening?

Belshe: "I've seen that actually, with some of our contractors. If they don't pay, they get kidnapped. Right now we have five contractors that have been kidnapped. The weird thing is, usually a ransom comes out right away. With these, there isn't a ransom that's come out, so it's kind of a new tactic that's going through. They're more or less eliminating those that aren't paying (extortion money). Still, no bodies turned up."

INDC: What do you mean eliminating those who won't pay?

Belshe: "Those who refuse to give the money they're supposedly due. Fortunately, we saw this in our own country - in the United States as we were a young country and up-and-coming. You saw the same type of corruption we see. I think it just comes with a growing democratic society - I don't know if you want to put that much of a name on it. At some point, the Fallujan people are gonna have to stand up on their own and tell these people, 'get out. we're done.' You know, (that) they want their freedoms and they're tired of these people operating in their city."

"I tell the contractors that all the time. They're locals. They're the ones, they live out there with their families. Because they always tell us, 'security's bad. Why don't you do anything about it?' At some point we can't handle it because we don't know where they are. 'You guys live out there. You know exactly where they're at. You know who's approaching you for money. We don't know. You won't tell us. At some point, you as a community - you as a Fallujan people - are gonna have to stand up and squeeze them out of your own city. It seems impossible right now, but the day will come when you'll have to do that or nothing will get done in the city.'"

As the local pool of insurgents dry up in Anbar and security continues to improve, I suspect that tips will increase, the nature of this problem will shift somewhat from violent crime to corruption, and a greater portion of the crime will be for its own sake, rather than to fund jihad.

As this is a story based on a leaker's analysis of a forthcoming report, and not a direct analysis of the report (nor is it the report itself), apply grains of salt to taste:

The administration is planning to make public today parts of a sober new report by American intelligence agencies expressing deep doubts that the government of the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, can overcome sectarian differences. Government officials who have seen the report say it gives a bleak outlook on the chances Mr. Maliki can meet milestones intended to promote unity in Iraq.

As the end of the Congressional recess draws closer, the debate over Iraq policy will only intensify, and the new intelligence assessment, called "Prospects for Iraq's Stability" is likely to play an important role in that discussion. Officials said the assessment concluded that Mr. Maliki retained support among Shiite groups in part because putting together a new government would be arduous. Officials in Washington and Baghdad have said for months that any military gains would be ephemeral if Iraqi politicians were not able to bridge sectarian divides.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the report will be issued this morning, and spokesmen for both the White House and the director of national intelligence declined to comment. "The report says that there's been little political progress to date, and it's very gloomy on the chances for political progress in the future," said one Congressional official with knowledge of its contents.

Disheartening, but none of this is shocking.

Remember to factor in ground-up political progress, as well as how quickly the political equation can change in any given direction in Iraq. The "tenuous case for strategic patience" remains, based on the young application of the new security strategy and the new opportunity in the west.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, the WaPo is labeling Maliki a scapegoat:

More broadly, the frustration of Americans with Iraqis is based on the assumption that a political reconciliation among Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds is achievable within weeks or months. This is wishful thinking, driven by the common desire of the White House and Congress to end or at least wind down the U.S. mission. In fact, Iraqis are not yet ready to come to terms with each other and may not be for some years. They will settle their country's future on their own timetable, responding to events in Iraq rather than to pressure from Washington. Mr. Maliki is a poor prime minister, but a change of government would not quickly lead to the elusive accords. The coming debate about the future of the U.S. mission in Iraq needs to grapple with that reality.

UPDATE: Rich Lowry features passages from the actual report.

I can't help but feel a twinge of journalistic envy reading this excellent interview from Fallujah. A key bit about the local mindset:

TCJ: How badly has the lack of political reconciliation harmed the efforts to pacify the Anbar Province and in particular Fallujah? It seems that there is still much animosity between Fallujah and Baghdad.

Lt. Col. Mullen: I cannot comment too much on the political situation in Baghdad, but the people here do not like the Iraqi Government and blame them for all the shortcomings in fuel, food and essential services. I will say also though that things are rarely as bad as the Iraqis make them out to be. They are prone to serious over exaggeration and always want to blame someone else. It is never their fault. For example, fuel arrives in the city, but to make extra money, the truck drivers sell it to "free enterprise" folks that then sell it curbside from plastic jugs - it is known as black market fuel where we come from. They charge much more than normal and keep the fuel from getting to the gas stations and city government in enough amounts to keep them open and operating. They also tap into electrical and water lines illegally to get better service, all of which seriously degrades the overall service provided. The city government is working on these things, but they all contribute to the problems Fallujah is having, and the Fallujans blame it all on the "Iranians" who make up the current government. In the general opinion here, only Sunni can run a country properly, as they have until the past few years. You also have a hard time convincing them that they are a minority. The things they come up with really are amazing at times. It is only a semi-literate society though so word of mouth, despite how illogical or ridiculous the rumor, has a big impact - especially if it is along the lines of what they want to believe.

It's interesting how badly this finger-pointing culture clashes with the "can-do" self-sufficiency inherent to Marines. But both sides plod on through. Read the rest - it's candid, great stuff.

(Via IP)

US and Iraqi soldiers (IAs) battling insurgents in Adhamiyah, Iraq 2007:

Interesting part: seeing the IAs carefully aim and fire their weapons at about 2:08.

Next, a dance-off in Afghanistan:

I actually think the Afghan cop won.

A Mother Jones article indicates that there's still a reporting shortage in Iraq:

No official tally of reporters on the ground exists, but a head count of American print correspondents, not including wire service scribes or freelancers, caps out at around 20. McClatchy has cut its American reporting staff in half, the Boston Globe has folded its bureau altogether, the Washington Post doesn't have nearly the presence it once did (although the paper wouldn't confirm exactly how many remain), and the number of embeds -more than 200 at a high point in early 2005 - was down to 48 by mid-April of this year. Edward Wong, who has covered the war since 2003 for the New York Times, describes the Western press corps in Iraq as "a skeleton crew."

Why?

Borzou Daragahi, the former Los Angeles Times Baghdad bureau chief, says he can easily count 20 times when he thought he was going to die. And every reporter who's spent time in Iraq has had close calls with ieds or insurgents. For that reason, and for financial ones, too - even a shoestring bureau costs more than $1 million a year- most news organizations have chosen to cut back or eliminate the large operations they fielded at the beginning of the war.

It's important to note that there are varying degrees of risk. Embeds take calculated, manageable risks, whereas foreign journalists who operate independently outside the wire assume unacceptable risks. As one Iraqi stringer describes the latter:

When I ask him what he can report that Western correspondents can't, he turns quiet. "Being a foreign journalist here," he finally says, "It's just like committing suicide."

Which forces the situation recently criticized by the blogosphere: local Iraqi stringers feeding reports to their Western media handlers which they cannot fact-check. I think that editors need to apply a higher level of skepticism to such reports - verifying basic events and casualty figures with military PAOs is a simple step - but it's not really fair to wholly condemn the MSM's use of stringers when moving amongst the local population means certain death. And where private security can help keep such a journalist alive, a high-profile entourage of armed personnel changes the dynamic of the story and/or frightens people away from being seen giving an interview. Plus, the expense is beyond the capability of smaller news outlets, if not the wire services or tv bureaus.

Independent bureaus aside, there's really little excuse for a low presence of military embeds. Aside from armor, equipment and insurance, everything is supplied by the military. Yes, there's the inevitable critique that embed reports show a military-centric perspective compared to reports filed independently, but it's still a remarkable opportunity to get an up-close perspective on what's going on in any given locale. And much of the aforementioned, needed fact-checking of questionable stories filed by local stringers could be accomplished by a reporter embedded with a US military unit close to the event.

A couple of European journalists I met in Baghdad told me how they had begged every newspaper on the continent for accreditation to go to Iraq as embeds, and were turned away by almost all of them because of a professional culture of risk aversion. But danger isn't the only reason - one of these guys just told me that editors also "don't feel like buying Iraq anymore, they are bored." It seems war fatigue is setting in all over.

Also interesting in the article: Western journalists bristle at criticism for being holed up at bureaus ...

The correspondents who do remain, however, blanch at being called "hotel journalists" - a term they think connotes laziness, when it takes tremendous effort just to conduct a simple interview.

... while a local stringer is angered at his work being kept under wraps:

A former Iraqi reporter for a major U.S. newspaper told me that the paper's Baghdad bureau chief emailed his whole staff forbidding them to speak with me. He thinks he knows the reason: "I didn't want to say it first, but I can't hide it anymore," he wrote. "I am sick of them hiding [behind] the bravery of the Iraqi staff who go out and do the reporting while the American journalists ... hide behind their compound's blast walls and then get the credit."

If you'd like to increase the quality and quantity of reporting from Iraq, please donate to Public MultiMedia. Applying the April figure mentioned in the Mother Jones article (48), PMI might soon accredit 13% of the embedded reporters in Iraq.

In September of 2006, the number of embedded reporters dropped as low as nine.

(Hat tip)

UPDATE: See also:

U.S. media reporting of the war in Iraq fell sharply in the second quarter of 2007, largely due to a drop in coverage of the Washington-based policy debate, a study released Monday said.

Taken together, the war's three major story lines -- the U.S. policy debate, events in Iraq and their impact on the U.S. homefront -- slipped roughly a third, to 15 percent of an index of total news coverage, down from 22 percent in the first three months of the year.

An Iraqi hero:

"He could have run behind us or away from us, but he made the decision to sacrifice himself to protect everyone. Having talked with his father, I was told that even if he would have known the outcome before hand, he wouldn't have acted differently."

Capt. Brian Gilbert, of Boise, Idaho, the commander of Company D, 1st Battalion, 15th Infantry Regiment, currently attached to 3-1 Cavalry, echoed Kane's sentiment.

"I spoke with the father," Gilbert said. "He said he has no remorse in his son's death because he died saving American Soldiers."

Read the rest.

(Via HA)

"You're not the only dissident ..."

The NYT runs a bleak op-ed by seven NCO's serving in the 82nd Airborne in Iraq:

Political reconciliation in Iraq will occur, but not at our insistence or in ways that meet our benchmarks. It will happen on Iraqi terms when the reality on the battlefield is congruent with that in the political sphere. There will be no magnanimous solutions that please every party the way we expect, and there will be winners and losers. The choice we have left is to decide which side we will take. Trying to please every party in the conflict - as we do now - will only ensure we are hated by all in the long run.

That's the key graf, I think, but do read the whole thing. I find the negatives in the piece well-phrased and similar to the opinion of some soldiers and marines I met in Iraq. One officer, whose outlook always sharply varied between optimism and exasperation, liked to say, "Iraq doesn't have founding fathers, it has founding Godfathers."

Which brings us to this extremely long but worthy rebuttal by Grim at Blackfive. A key bit:

A COIN strategy of disaggregation relies on fragmenting opposition movements, to make each of them easier to defeat in detail. Here, the fragmentation is already accomplished. There is not a Shi'ite front to -- in the words of the article -- "realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are - an army of occupation - and force our withdrawal." The Shi'ites are more concerned about each other than about us, or even the Sunnis. The article suggests that the Shi'ites are trying to 'consolidate their hold over Iraq,' but what they really seem to be doing is competing for the right to consolidate the Shi'ite majority.

That, then, is the first point: this particular enemy is divided against itself.

This fragmentation (also mentioned here) adds a key dimension to the strategic elements presented by the NYT op-ed writers and most domestic analysis of the war; namely, the parties vying for power in Iraq are much, much more indistinct than the popular characterization of "the Shia, the Sunni and the Kurds." In addition to a large proportion of non-combatants who don't care about such identifications, the warring parties themselves are a splintered mass of nationalists, former Baathists, jihadi terrorists, Shia militiamen, (relatively) well-intentioned civil servants, criminal gangs, corrupt police and soldiers, (relatively) non-corrupt police and soldiers, etc., all elbowing each other to fill the power vacuum. At one point, many more of these entities shared a common cause against the United States, but at this stage of the game, more have aligned with us and turned on others. In the case of a nationwide flip against the maniacs of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, this is fantastic news. The ultimate prize - stabilizing a national government as "the biggest, most respected, non-sectarian and relatively benevolent gang allied with US interests" - remains frustrating.

In light of this splintered opposition, the hands off approach advocated by the NCOs in the NYT would indeed spur resolution in Iraq. But that end state would simply crown the most ruthless players in a crowded field, and leave the door open for other countries besides the United States to continue expressing their interests. One can still intelligently endorse this outcome - determining that American blood and treasure are not worth the effort - but it's important to frankly analyze both the consequences and the fragmented nature of the interested parties in Iraq. For example, if America were to "choose sides" with "the Shia" ... which ones?

I have no love for Beauchamp, and even less for The New Republic's credulousness, potential nepotism, fact-checking and subsequent stonewalling, but isn't this expose on the Baghdad Diarist a bit, er, uh, unsubtle? The diagnosis of Beauchamp as a "sociopath" in a "report," based on the testimony of a jilted ex-fiance, is a particular overreach.

The piece does introduce interesting new information, but I half-expected to read "Rita Skeeter" on the byline.*

* Not because of any fabrication, rather the British tabloid-like tone.

UPDATE: I've received two e-mails along these lines:

Read More »

The Battle of Donkey Island:

Stark and his men exchanged few words as their Humvees turned east, progressing with more difficulty along narrow and sometimes swampy trails as they neared the Nassar canal, looking for possible weapons smugglers using wooden boats. Just after 9:15 p.m., the heat was still sweltering, and the armor-clad soldiers were soaked with sweat.

About 200 yards from the canal, Stark's Humvee crested a small dirt berm, and his driver, Spec. Kevin Gilbertson, saw something odd: two large semitrucks parked just to the left of the road ahead.

"I wonder what they're doing?" Gilbertson called to Stark. Then they spotted a few men fleeing across the field to the south and accelerated toward the trucks.

Stark recalled that he turned and to his disbelief saw clustered behind the trucks -- only a few feet away -- at first 10, then 20, then as many as 70 heavily armed men.

"Traverse left, open fire!" he yelled instinctively to his gunner. Startled, Pfc. Sean Groves unleashed a rapid burst from his M240 machine gun.

In the same instant, the insurgents returned a barrage of fire with AK-47 assault rifles, heavy machine guns and hand grenades. Bullets shattered the ballistic glass on Stark's Humvee, breaking the driver's window and cracking the windshield like a spider's web. Shrapnel tore into Groves's face and hands. He dropped down inside the vehicle. Gilbertson jumped into the gunner's sling, and Groves took control of the Humvee, now limping with two flat tires on the left side. Stark tried to radio the two vehicles behind him but had lost communication.

"Red 8, what the hell is going on?" Sgt. 1st Class Feliciano Young, the platoon sergeant in the next Humvee, recalled shouting into the radio, using Stark's call sign.

Read the rest.

Mudville Gazette has the details, including this quote from Paul Rieckhoff of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America:

The Nation violated the trust of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America and many of the service members interviewed. Reporters told our members that the focus of this piece was their experience in Iraq generally, not civilian casualties specifically. Many of the veterans involved spent hours talking to Ms. Al-Arian and shared deeply personal recollections on a variety of subjects, only to have their experiences misrepresented and/or isolated. The most graphic recollections were removed from context and used to bolster a preconceived conclusion by the authors about the patterns and frequency of civilian deaths. Critical facts were obscured or omitted entirely. This entire piece is a glaring example of the type of low-quality journalism that has been all too common in the coverage of the war in Iraq since it began.

Abuse of power is infuriating, and that's exactly what manipulative journalism is.

(Via IP)

"Secondly, I think the consequences of pulling back precipitously would be potentially catastrophic for the Iraqi people themselves, to whom we have a tremendous responsibility ... and in the long run chaotic for the region as a whole and for our own security."

"'They're like this child at Christmas, wanting to get the pony,' a congressional source told me last week. The 'pony' being the United States staying put in Iraq. 'But they can't get the pony, they'll get something else.'"

"They were looking up and me and smiling. This may all sound mawkishly sweet, but I don't care. This is what happened today. "

I concur with a commenter under this post: an AFP editor somewhere may indeed be "as dumb as a bag of hammers."

Or perhaps, "as dumb as a bin of spent brass."

PMI's Wesley Morgan reports from a patrol on Haifa Street:

As we pushed through Saddamiya, I couldn't see my own feet, it was so dark, but the soldiers had their night-vision devices, and my brain stopped for a moment again to tell me how truly bizarre my surroundings were: walking forward in complete darkness, the only light the faint green glow of one nearby soldier's night goggles, through a ruinous, blacked out neighborhood that at the time of Princeton intersession had been the scene of a deadly battle between Stryker soldiers and heavily armed concentrations of al Qaeda and Tawhid wal-Jihan terrorists. As we walked down the last block of Haifa Street toward the trees at gate of the COP, Lt. Col. Peterson walked by me and said, from the blackness: "Now you can tell people you walked the length of what six months ago was the most dangerous street in Iraq."

LTC Peterson's superlative and the incredible feelings described by Morgan are well-made.

Matt Sanchez features a brief video interview with a revelatory conclusion, and notes in an e-mail:

Everyday, soldiers talk to Iraqis, hear their concerns and, surprise, form relations. These personal relations between Iraqis and the American military may just be the least reported aspect of the war.

I agree with that sentiment.

Michael Totten's latest dispatch is excellent:

The American soldier sitting next to me flipped open his Zippo lighter and gloomily lit a cigarette. "Do you know why this base isn't attacked by insurgents?" he said.

I assumed it was because his area of operations, in the Graya'at neighborhood of northern Baghdad out of Coalition Outpost War Eagle, had been cleared of insurgents. Many American military bases and outposts in Iraq are attacked by Al Qaeda terrorists and Mahdi Army militiamen with mortars and rockets. War Eagle was quiet and had not been bombarded for months.

"We aren't being attacked because the Mahdi Army is in the next building," he said. "They don't want to hit their own people."

Read the rest, including this tidy summary of counterinsurgency:

"If someone sets up a mortar," said Lieutenant Colonel Wilson A. Shoffner, "we get phone calls from the locals before it is fired. We reached a tipping point here where we have more friends than the insurgents."

Totten also discusses the negative implications of Mahdi Army influence in the Iraqi Army and Iraq as a whole. I'll throw another wrinkle into the mix: Totten characterizes Moqtada al Sadr and his militiamen as destabilizers and a proxy for Iran, and in many respects, this is true. He also mentions that Sadr's men attack Americans to increase leverage in negotiations, which I'm sure is also true. But complicating that assessment even further is the example of a Sunni journalist who hated Iranian influence and pined for bygone days of Baath stability ... who also told me he regarded Sadr as a national hero, "a good man." The attacks on American forces not only serve as chits in rough diplomacy with the US and Iraqi government, but also as a macho standard around which the broader Iraqi culture rallies. Much as Saddam Hussein scored points in the Arab world for standing up to the Americans, so does Sadr, via the periodic sacrifice of his militiamen.

And a further complication is the decentralized nature of goons who identify as Mahdi Army but act outside of Sadr's control ...

As Totten notes:

Iraq is a bewildering country.

*** 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.

From an interview conducted earlier this year:

INDC: Who is the insurgency? Who are the people who plant bombs every day and shoot at Americans, IA and police?

Yusef: "They have some ideology from some of the American prisons, the one in Buca and south, in those two prisons there were extremist religious insurgents. The Americans took those people and put them in the prison too and they (the radicals) worked on the other prisoners, teaching them and feeding them that ideology of fighting and to think that everyone else is a sinner and that they should be killed."

Note: I spoke to a Marine Detention Facility Officer intimately familiar with the mentioned corrections facilities, and he verified this characterization; young Iraqis on the fence are often radicalized there, initially associating with fundamentalists as a survival mechanism.

INDC: So the majority of the insurgency here is religious radicals?

Yusef: "People in Iraq fighting, they are kids. They have no knowledge, they are ignorant from both sides, about their religion and education-wise. They (the radicals) buy them with money, so why not? Some guys who work with insurgents and start killing people, when they begin and kill one, they cannot leave."

INDC: What do you mean, they can't stop killing?

The interpreter explains: "It's like when you join a gang in the states. Once you do something, that's it, you cannot leave."

A Newsweek exclusive reveals that Iraqis and the US Military are addressing the problem with a deprogramming effort:

Wiry and lean, Abdullah looks on with a glassy stare as the instructor explains the subject for the day: revenge. The case study is the first gulf war, and the instructor lists religious and moral reasons why it was wrong for Iraqi soldiers to loot and kill in Kuwait. Abdullah, 17, and the nine other teenagers sitting with him on wooden benches in the class nod impassively. This isn't an ordinary high school. The teens, all decked out in orange uniforms, are detainees at Camp Cropper, the high-security facility in Iraq that once held Saddam Hussein.

Some of the teens may have tried to kill American or Iraqi soldiers, others may have been picked up for smaller offenses like breaking curfew. But the group, all Sunnis, have one thing in common: they've all been brainwashed for jihad. "They get their education from Wahhabis," says Sheik Abdul Jabbar, 37, an Iraqi cleric working with the teens, as he looks on from the side of the class. "They say their enemy is the Shia first and then the Americans." Abdullah has had his dose of radical education. He is convinced that his stepmother, who is Shiite, is a kafir, or nonbeliever. He has told the instructors in the class that, given the chance, he would kill her. "If they let them out, they would all become suicide bombers," says Jabbar. "Soon we will have two generations of terrorists."

And that's what the "religious education" program at Cropper is trying to prevent. It's not exactly "Scared Straight," but the goal - winning back hearts and minds - is the same. Last week, NEWSWEEK was given an exclusive tour of the facility and allowed to sit in on classes. The program was started two months ago and the classes are taught by imams, psychiatrists and counselors, all Iraqis, who are trying to bring the most hardened youth back into the fold.

Read the rest.

I'm headed back to Iraq for two weeks on August 30th, to report on the situation in Fallujah prior to Gen. Petraeus's September report. I'm accredited with Bill Roggio's Public Multimedia, Inc., and would sincerely appreciate any (tax deductible) donations that cover expenses (airfare, insurance, etc.) through his shop. If you choose to give, please mark the subject or notes line with "Bill Ardolino":

Donate to PMI

Some of my coverage will focus on the state of the Iraqi Police (IP) and the US Police Transition Team (PTT) mission. At the end of my last trip, the Iraqi Police were at a turning point: they had just become officially responsible for the security of Fallujah (along with the Iraqi Army), they were in a largely defensive posture, recruiting was accelerating, they had a brand new police chief and there was a question as to whether the effort would gain or lose momentum.

I shot the following video in January to show a day in the life of the Iraqi Police and their Marine advisors. Note: odd camera angles and blurring are done to protect identities and classified material. Content Warning: this video contains a graphic image of dead insurgents.

From what I've heard since my departure, the IPs made progress, marked by the police chief establishing his authority and putting the force on offense, though logistical problems still hamper the effort. Again, please donate to support a first-hand update:

Donate to PMI

For more on the Iraqi Police & Police Transition Team in Fallujah, see:

Read More »

At FOB Justice in Baghdad.

Fox News:

The reaction has been huge. The song shot to No. 1 in Pakistan. And thanks to the Web, it's gone global. There have been 65,000 downloads thus far.

The video has now been released in the U.K. with subtitles. The U.K., like Pakistan, is no stranger to terrorism. Officials in the two countries think the song is great.

The song (with English subtitles) is here. Can't say I dig the tune, but I love the message.

(Via Claude Pate)

Today's WaPo article about former Sunni insurgents eager to join the political process makes a nice follow-up my post about the importance of provincial elections:

The Sunni insurgent leader lifted up his T-shirt, revealing a pistol stuck in his belt, and explained to a U.S. sergeant visiting his safe house why he'd stopped attacking Americans.

"Finally, we decided to cooperate with American forces and kick al-Qaeda out and have our own country," said the tough-talking, confident 21-year-old, giving only his nom de guerre, Abu Lwat. Then he offered another motive: "In the future, we want to have someone in the government," he said, holding his cigarette with a hand missing one finger.

Abu Lwat is one of a growing number of Sunni fighters working with U.S. forces in what American officers call a last-ditch effort to gain power and legitimacy under Iraq's Shiite-dominated government. The tentative cooperation between the fighters and American forces is driven as much by political aspirations as by a rejection of the brutal methods of the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq, U.S. officers and onetime insurgents said.

"This is much less about al-Qaeda overstepping than about them [Sunnis] realizing that they've lost," said Lt. Col. Douglas Ollivant, a planner for the U.S. military command in Baghdad. As a result, Sunni groups are now "desperately trying to cut deals with us," he said. "This is all about the Sunnis' 'rightful' place to rule" in a future Iraqi government, he said.

Maybe so, but I spoke to a lot of Sunnis in Fallujah who were plenty angered by al-Qaeda and the general lack of law and order; when it seems like everyone you interview has had a family member attacked, tortured, kidnapped and/or killed by extremists or criminal gangs, it's not hard to understand why ...

Abu Lwat, who fought with the 1920 group, said he had grown disillusioned after seeing his community decimated. "When first al-Qaeda got here, they called themselves the mujaheddin and said they would fight for the country. All the people liked them," Abu Lwat said. But what followed were executions and beheadings of local leaders, bans on smoking and mandatory veils for women that defied true Islamic values and "killed the life here," he said.

Whatever the primary motivation, Sunni maneuvering to enage in politics is a positive development, if a late one.

UPDATE: More on grassroots political momentum from Grim @ B5 and General Kevin Bergner:

What the general points to here are local, often tribal attempts to urge the central government in the direction of reconciliation, and to commit to reconciliation in their own areas. This is what we would call a grassroots movement, if we saw it in America. Such movements, properly organized, can become powerful even against entrenched interests willing to use violence against them -- we can look at the start of unions in America, for example.

If that proves to be the case, a grassroots movement of this type would provide very strong and stable foundation for a national political reconciliation. It is, obviously, too soon to assert that is what will happen; but it is soon enough to notice that there is movement in that direction, in many areas across Iraq.

Very cool.

(Via HA)

Via Greg Sargent, here's an analysis of the Surge and current options in Iraq by Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic & International Studies. Cordesman traveled with Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack on the same fact-finding trip which prefaced their recent NYT Op-Ed with the hopeful title. War skeptic Sargent linked Cordesman as a contrast to O'Hanlon and Pollack's optimism, and his lede is championed by the opening of the report's summary:

Everyone sees Iraq differently. As one leading US official in Iraq put it, "the current situation is like playing three dimensional chess in the dark while someone is shooting at you." It is scarcely surprising that my perceptions of a recent trip to Iraq are different from that of two of my traveling companions and those of several other recent think tank travelers to the country.

But the rest of Cordesman's analysis isn't really very different after all (as Sargent acknowledges), and is also quite comparable to the post I put up on the Surge yesterday, right down to the use of the word "tenuous" to describe Iraq's prospects for stability:

From my perspective, the US now has only uncertain, high risk options in Iraq. It cannot dictate Iraq’s future, only influence it, and this presents serious problems at a time when the Iraqi political process has failed to move forward in reaching either a new consensus or some form of peaceful coexistence. It is Iraqis that will shape Iraq's ability or inability to rise above its current sectarian and ethnic conflicts, to redefine Iraq's politics and methods of governance, establish some level of stability and security, and move towards a path of economic recovery and development. So far, Iraq's national government has failed to act at the rate necessary to move the country forward or give American military action political meaning.

The attached trip report does, however, show there is still a tenuous case for strategic patience in Iraq, and for timing reductions in US forces and aid to Iraqi progress rather than arbitrary dates and uncertain benchmarks. It recognizes that strategic patience is a high risk strategy, but it also describes positive trends in the fighting, and hints of future political progress.

I agree with almost all of this characterization and I also agree with O'Hanlon and Pollack's Op-Ed. Despite the difference in the degree of optimism vs. skepticism which lead the respective reports, the prescription is about the same: strategic patience in Iraq as the new military strategy provides a window for dubious political process. The remainder of his synopsis:

These trends are uncertain, and must be considered in the context of a long list of serious political, military, and economic risks that are described in detail. The report also discusses major delays and problems in the original surge strategy. The new US approach to counterinsurgency warfare is making a difference, but it still seems likely from a visit to the scene that the original strategy President Bush announced in January would have failed if it had not been for the Sunni tribal awakening.

Luck, however, is not something that can be ignored, and there is a window of opportunity that could significantly improve the chances of US success in Iraq if the Iraqi government acts upon it. The US also now has a country team in Iraq that is far more capable than in the past, and which may be able to develop and implement the kind of cohesive plans for US action in Iraq that have been weak or lacking to date. If that team can come forward with solid plans for an integrated approach to a sustained US effort to deal with Iraq's plans and risks, there would be a far stronger and more bipartisan case for strategic patience.

On the positive side, the Sunni tribal awakening seems to be spreading. Less hopefully, the Federal government is in disarray, and the perception of Maliki's government as a biased arbitor of sectarian interests remains an impediment to reconciliation.

Which brings me to this brief analysis by Stuart Koehl of the Center for Transatlantic Relations at Johns Hopkins University-SAIS, where he e-mails Jim Geraghty to criticize the overemphasis on the Iraqi National Government in light of the decentralized nature of Iraqi politics:

The error being made- on your part as well as by others - is assuming that progress can only be made at the level of the national government. In fact, under the Iraqi constitution, the national government is rather weak, while traditionally real political power has been wielded on the local and regional level. And it is precisely at the local and regional level that we see real progress being made with regard both to power sharing and national reconciliation. Because of the social and constitutional structure of Iraq, political progress cannot be imposed from the top-down, but must percolate from the bottom up. To some extent, the members of the national assembly and the unity government are merely play-acting, posturing for the cameras until such time as a consensus emerges on the local level that will prompt them to act. The success of our counter-insurgency effort on the political front is not measured in the assembly chamber, but in the tribal councils. And there, we are definitely winning.

Mr. Koehl is more than half-right. As I stressed in yesterday's piece, "It's hard to underestimate the importance of developments in Iraq's political climate before the end of the year, especially the participation in and results of upcoming provincial elections." In addition to progress already achieved within traditional political channels (the tribes), the provincial (and any local) elections are important because they take the staggering gains made during the awakenings and channel the energy into Iraq's official politics. A large portion of the Sunni leadership in Iraq boycotted the political process and engaged in or supported the nationalist insurgency. The Sunni nationalist refocus on purging al Qaeda has finally engaged them with the Americans and employment in Iraq's official security forces, and a further engagement in regional politics may be the sublimation needed to keep sheiks from reverting to insurgency once AQ is eradicated from Anbar, Babil and the scenes of other awakenings.

This strategy born of limited options was highlighted in the original report by Robert Burns:

Despite political setbacks, American commanders are clinging to a hope that stability might be built from the bottom up with local groups joining or aiding U.S. efforts to root out extremists rather than from the top down, where national leaders have failed to act.

But where the bottom-up strategy shows its limit is in the power wielded by Iraq's national bureaucracies. This power is expressed in the allocation of pay and logistical resources to provincial governments and local security forces. And here is an anecdotal problem with the way that system operates:

1. National Ministry leadership and staff reflect the Iraqi National government. Problematically, this can lead to sectarian interest, corruption and inexperience, as those with the greatest experience (former Baathists) were locked out of government. I wrote about this in an interview piece from January:

Raazzaq went on to describe the problem behind executive inaction: the political patronage of Iraq's new direct democracy had squeezed qualified workers - especially former Baathists and Sunnis - out of ministry jobs. In a country with tragically high unemployment and a politically ascendant underclass, such jobs constitute an irresistible reward system that distorts an effective workforce. Multiple sources, from civilian and military press that I've spoken to who are familiar with the Iraqi ministries, to the Hitchens' piece linked earlier in this post, verify Raazzaq's opinion that Iraq's bureaucratic inertia greatly stems from political patronage standing up unqualified candidates. Compounding the problem is turnover; as one set of bureaucrats fails and is let go en masse, another set of unqualified familial and political patrons takes over, resetting the learning curve required to actually accomplish the functions of the ministry in question. As he put it:

Raazzaq: "All ministries now are split up (and run by political parties) who put only their member and let the others go. It is not good. And when their (party) members are gone, they bring in another (party) and it is nothing."

Last I was aware, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (a Shiite party and former resistance group against the Baathists) ran the Ministry of the Interior (MOI). [See last update] The MOI pays and supplies the Iraqi police nationwide.

2. National impact trickles down to the local level when cops in Fallujah can't get fuel to run their patrol vehicles and generators. A lot of this (perhaps most) is due to corruption - at each step down the supply line, someone skims the cream off the top, middle and bottom," as one Marine put it, and those at the end of the supply line suffer. But the degree to which a Shia-dominated ministry witholds resources from Sunni cops probably plays a role as well - though I stress that this is conjecture on my part. And given the prospect of civil war after American withdrawal, it makes sense that those with command of resources wouldn't want to empower future competitors.

Thus, while I might agree that bottom-up political progress is more significant than progress by the Federal government, I'm fairly sure that you can't have a successful Iraq without both. National political reconciliation and resource-sharing, dominated and exemplified by haggling over oil, are key to Iraq's success. Political developments in the next three-six months - at both the national and regional level - will be pivotal.

UPDATE: Regarding the Ministry of the Interior, see this article by Ned Parker:

Read More »

Comments seem to be fixed. I'm reopening the comments section for all three of you who stuck around after my long summer break.

Thanks to DaF for checking under the hood.

As an old-school blogospheric "scalp hunter," I agree with the principle behind Rick Moran's post:

This medium, we have to keep reminding ourselves, is still fairly new. And as more and more people enter the blog universe - many looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow - it is inevitable that they too, wish to get in on the fun of scalp hunting. One way to climb up the winding stairs to the top of the ziggurat is to outshout your competitors while attaching more importance to a story than it deserves. This will get you traffic, links, and the admiration of your fellow bloggers.

I understand the game. I've played it for three years, shamelessly piling on and then shooting off emails to big bloggers hoping they would find my insightful, pithy comments about the swarm du jour good enough to link. There's nothing inherently dishonest in this method of self-promotion - unless what you write isn't what you truly feel in which case you won't last long anyway. But I truly believe now that blogs have to move beyond this phase. To what end, I have no idea. I couldn’t have foreseen where blogs are now 3 years ago when I started so my powers of prognostication when it comes to blogging and internet media are practically nil.

I only know a growing sense of unease elicited by the notion that by overhyping stories like the Beauchamp caper, the credibility of the medium suffers. For that reason alone, it may be time to put down the blood stained hatchets and begin to seriously examine just what we should be doing that will increase our influence rather than make us look like a bunch of one dimensional attack dogs.

I think that the Beauchamp story is worthy, primarily based on the determination of whether the New Republic was taken by a dishonest contributor (again). Those rating the story meaningless forget that professional journalism is structurally inclined to hold itself to a high standard when falsehoods or egregious errors are uncovered, not to mention the fact that the last episode of fabulism at the New Republic merited a movie based on the event. Beauchamp's literary misdeeds aren't as extensive as those of Stephen Glass, but they're certainly important if you care about standards in journalism. It's a profession where credibility is the currency.

But Moran's point about overenthusiastic scalp-hunting remains. And somewhat related is that, as this story was hashed out in the blogosphere, more subjective arguments have seamlessly intermingled with fact-checking the claims, from "it's a right-wing distraction from the war," to "it's a left-wing bid to undermine the military," to even commenting or speculating on the sexuality of Beauchamp and one of his investigators. I have a lot more sympathy for some of these arguments than others, but they can become binding distractions when dominating a given author's analysis of whether the claims published by TNR were true or not. Opponents zero in on and refute the more wildly subjective points with wildly subjective points of their own, and the meat of the matter can be lost in the swirl.

Individual "truths" are forged, the narrative is consigned to binary partisanship in the minds of many and it's a painful, messy spectacle. But in the end, the truth outs. So I guess it all works, even while the shouting and disproportion might seem to undermine the credibility of the blogging medium as a whole.

I empathize with Moran's desire for an evolution in the blogosphere. I hope future blogospheric fishing expeditions are conducted with due proportion and focus. But these are vain hopes, perhaps coupled with vain worries.

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey puts out a good post which highlights a weak part of Moran's piece:

Rick Moran warns the Right that this doesn't mean the war is won in Iraq. I don't think that was the issue at all, though. This blogswarm was born of frustration over what the Right sees as slanted coverage of the Iraq effort. We're not claiming that the war has been won, but we're saying that the media has slanted their coverage to make it appear lost when it isn't. Scott Beauchamp and TNR gave the blogosphere an example of clear journalistic malpractice -- and it pounced, in droves.

UPDATE: Apparently the veracity or fabulism of the TNR pieces remains contested. This sets up a massive plate of crow for either the Weekly Standard or the New Republic.

Robert Burns delivers some good news ...

The new U.S. military strategy in Iraq, unveiled six months ago to little acclaim, is working.

In two weeks of observing the U.S. military on the ground and interviewing commanders, strategists and intelligence officers, it's apparent that the war has entered a new phase in its fifth year.

... tempered by some uncomfortable reality:

It is a phase with fresh promise yet the same old worry: Iraq may be too fractured to make whole.

No matter how well or how long the U.S. military carries out its counterinsurgency mission, it cannot guarantee victory.

Only the Iraqis can. And to do so they probably need many more months of heavy U.S. military involvement. Even then, it is far from certain that they are capable of putting this shattered country together again.

Read the whole thing.

Meanwhile, negative developments in Basra echo fears about what would/will happen in the rest of the country after American withdrawal:

As British forces pull back from Basra in southern Iraq, Shiite militias there have escalated a violent battle against each other for political supremacy and control over oil resources, deepening concerns among some U.S. officials in Baghdad that elements of Iraq's Shiite-dominated national government will turn on one another once U.S. troops begin to draw down.

Three major Shiite political groups are locked in a bloody conflict that has left the city in the hands of militias and criminal gangs, whose control extends to municipal offices and neighborhood streets. The city is plagued by "the systematic misuse of official institutions, political assassinations, tribal vendettas, neighborhood vigilantism and enforcement of social mores, together with the rise of criminal mafias that increasingly intermingle with political actors," a recent report by the International Crisis Group said.

No area of Iraq is quite like another, but the prevalence of "criminal gangs" and "systematic misuse of official institutions, political assassinations [and] tribal vendettas" are pretty universal in all but Iraqi Kurdistan. I've previously highlighted this gangsterism and scarcity of civic spirit as Iraq's most pressing problems. And problematically, the best solution is a long-term American dedication and oversight that mirrors British colonialism without the absolute control, tribute and exploitation. We all know how unrealistic any such level of commitment is ...

... which leads us back to the tenuous hope that stronger Iraqi leadership emerges that can forge a federal government with a broad national identity and strong and stable Iraqi Security Forces at its command. Military progress is promising, the political landscape, at least thus far, is more than a little shaky. It's hard to overestimate the importance of developments in Iraq's political climate before the end of the year, especially the participation in and results of upcoming provincial elections.

First parting food for thought: the disintegration of Maliki's coalition may actually be a very positive thing, if it were to pave the way for a new leader who is more palatable to a broad strata of Iraqis. Unfortunately, there's the obvious question as to whether the government has the time for such metamorphosis in the finite breathing space provided by the Surge. Note that "tenuous hope" does not mean "impossible," and anyone absolutely sure about what will happen in Iraq should pay close attention to Fall 2006 predictions vs. the rapid developments in Anbar over the past year.

UPDATE: Via Instapundit, another Michael Yon piece which supports the theory that corruption and a lack of civic spirit are the most powerful obstacles in Iraq:

Two officials were engaged in a conversation about how al Qaeda was able to infiltrate trouble spots in Iraq so effectively. The illuminating exchange revealed how much of the strife in Iraq is rooted not in religious fervor, but in greed. Greed for power, greed for money.

UPDATE: Time calls for Maliki to go.

UPDATE: Post slightly edited for form, not meaning.

UPDATE: More Surge Analysis: Pollack, O'Hanlon & the Other Guy, plus Iraqi Reform from the Ground-Up

(Via HA)

Michael Yon:

Amid all this talk of timetables for the War in Iraq, blurred as they are by a strange lemming-like compulsion to declare the "surge" strategy a failure almost before it actually began, one deadline looms larger with each passing day: It's time for a reckoning with the truth.
...
When it comes to Iraq, being there matters because of the massive disconnect between what most Americans think they know about Iraq, and what is actually going on there.

Read the whole thing.