Even the Guardian takes notice:

The death toll for US combat troops in Iraq dropped sharply to 27 last month, the lowest monthly total since March last year.

The figure is part of a downward trend that appears to confirm Pentagon claims that its "surge" strategy is working.

The month's last US fatalities were three soldiers killed on Tuesday when a bomb exploded as they patrolled southeast Baghdad.

The drop in US fatalities, mirrored by an apparent reduction in sectarian killings, is attributed by US commanders to the extra 30,000 US troops sent to Iraq this year to bring the total of US troops to 154,000.

Other factors cited include: the building of walls round Baghdad neighbourhoods that have restricted insurgents' movements; the increasing use of local sheiks and their militias to fight insurgents; and measures such as introducing proper ID checks, including biometric testing.

The Washington Post is more skeptical:

Casualty numbers themselves are inconsistent. The U.S. military said about 800 civilians were killed in October, but an unofficial tally by the Health Ministry showed that 1,448 civilians had died violently, including those whose bodies were dumped without identification. An official provided the data, which showed an increase in deaths compared with September, on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to release it publicly.

It is difficult to determine whether the underlying animosity between sectarian groups, which has driven so much violence, has diminished or whether attacks have become more difficult to carry out.

Outside Baghdad, many Iraqis interviewed still perceive grave threats from violence. They live in walled-off neighborhoods or under the relative protection of their ethnic group.

Basim Hamdi, 32, a Shiite merchant from Balad, about 50 miles north of Baghdad, described life in his city as a "sectarian fire."

"The security situation in Balad is so bad compared with last year," he said. "No one from here can go outside the city except for emergencies, and no Sunni can get in."

"We don't kill people, our low trading price kills people": Blackwater USA founder Erik Prince Here's an Onion headline that found its way into the New York Times: "Blackwater Tops All Firms in Iraq in Shooting Rate." So either DynCorps got assigned all the low-priority targets like Ari Fleischer's cousin, or else Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater USA, is sort of guy who changes the channel at home with an Uzi.

At this point, you can play a kind of failed state Mad Libs:

The State Department [was very forthcoming about / would not comment on] most matters relating to Blackwater, citing the current investigation. But Sean McCormack, the [witless flack who blamed Denmark for its problems with the Mohammed cartoons / department’s spokesman], said that of 1,800 escort missions by Blackwater this year, there had been “[only a thousand set of steak knives rewarded for high kill counts / only a very small fraction, very small fraction, that have involved any sort of use of force].”

No Blackwater employees, or any other contractors, have [failed to cooperate fully with Iraqi investigations / been charged with crimes] related to the shootings in Iraq, although there are a number of American laws governing actions overseas and in wartime that could be applied, according to experts in international law. In addition, a measure enacted last year calls for the Pentagon to bring contractors in Iraq under the jurisdiction of American military law, but the Defense Department [claims it wants to first make sure the punishments are harsh enough / has not yet put into effect the rules needed to do so.]

There are a host of multi-dimensional links between Kurds and Jews (to say nothing of the many thousands of Kurdish Jews.) It is sometimes claimed that Abraham was Kurdish. Historically, a good number of Kurds felt positively toward Israel and were none too happy with Palestinian support for Saddam. The Kurdish people, being victims of persecution and genocide, looked to Israel as a sort of hopeful model for their own liberation. Furthermore, DNA research shows that Kurds are Jews’ closest genetic relatives. So, perhaps this Kurdish-Jewish romantic comedy was inevitable. From The Seattle Times review of "David & Layla."

Inspired by the real-life marriage between a Kurdish Muslim refugee and a Jewish New Yorker, the movie hits all the requisite plot points, some hopelessly contrived (like a first kiss disguised as the need for CPR) while others earn big, fat, non-Greek belly laughs.

David (David Moscow) is an agnostic Jew who hosts a Brooklyn public-access TV show called "Sex and Happiness," for which he conducts highly personal man-in-the-street interviews. He's got a Jewish fiancée (Callie Thorne) but is truly smitten with Layla (Shiva Rose), a smart, sexy Kurdish refugee for whom marriage is the best defense against imminent deportation

You can pretty much guess the rest. But while writer-director Jay Jonroy (an Iraqi Kurdish exile with a tragic family history under Saddam Hussein's tyranny) fumbles with occasionally forced humor — including a terribly written infidelity scene that's played for slapstick and left unexplained — he's remarkably adept at exploring complex divisions between well-meaning but prejudiced families united by love.

If there is a Hell, I’d have to guess this movie is running on a continuous loop in Saddam’s sulfurous suite.

Apparently the film doesn’t shy away from politics and gets big points for addressing the U.S.’ previous betrayal of the Kurdish people. The movie is being independently released and seems pretty hard to find, but I’ll make sure to see it one way or another. I should add here that I highly recommend the 2004 Kurdish Iranian film “Turtles Can Fly,” in spite of its horrific title. It’s an achingly beautiful movie about the children of a Kurdish refugee camp on the eve of the U.S. attack on Saddam.

One of the fringe benefits of liberation is enjoying the talents of the liberated. With their emerging proficiency in film the Kurds may find they have yet something else in common with Jews.

George Packer reports:

The amendment raises the number of Iraqi interpreters and U.S. government employees (with at least one year of service) who can be admitted under a special immigrant visa program from five hundred to five thousand each year for the next five years. It creates a special category (“Priority 2”) of persecuted Iraqis—including U.S. employees, people working for American news and nongovernmental organizations, contractors, and members of religious minorities, and their families—whose refugee applications can be heard directly by the U.S. government without a United Nations referral, which should speed up and streamline an extremely sluggish process. And the bill allows for these applications to be reviewed at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, so that Iraqis don’t need to flee the country and become refugees elsewhere first (though the language on this point is vague, and there will have to be continuous pressure to make it happen).

About time. Those suffering from liberal outrage fatigue should work up a pulsating neck vein or two for George Bush's greatest crime in office: staying silent on the refugee catastrophe his mismanaged war has created.

In all the reports and essays being written on the supposed imminence of a U.S. bombing campaign against Iran, has any really addressed the possible Iranian responses? What would the mullahs do if, tomorrow, they awoke to find Bushehr reduced to rubble courtesy of American smart bombs? Would they dispatch the Quds Force into Baghdad; turn the entire nation into a latter-day Basiji martyrdom "wave" and try to drive the MNF-Iraq into the Gulf? Or would they start lobbing missiles of their own into Haifa and Tel Aviv, more or less guaranteeing if not World War III, as President Bush ominously phrased it, then at least the greatest international crisis the Middle East has yet known?

Or, given that a fear of regime change impels each and every policy decision and PR blitz undertaken by the mullahs, would their response be more rhetorical than martial? What would do more damage to long-term American interests in the Middle East: Iran's waging a disastrous war against us that it can by no means win, or expanding its interests in the infrastructure of Iraq?

Bomb us and we'll blackout Sadr City after giving its residents unhindered electricity for the first time in four years. Bomb us and we'll create economic chaos to add to your quixotic "political reconciliation." Bomb us and we'll stoke enough sectarian fire in Iraq to make you nostalgic for the razing of the Golden Mosque.

BAGHDAD, Oct. 17 -- Iraq has agreed to award $1.1 billion in contracts to Iranian and Chinese companies to build a pair of enormous power plants, the Iraqi electricity minister said Tuesday. Word of the project prompted serious concerns among American military officials, who fear that Iranian commercial investments can mask military activities at a time of heightened tension with Iran.

The Iraqi electricity minister, Karim Wahid, said that the Iranian project would be built in Sadr City, a Shiite enclave in Baghdad that is controlled by followers of the anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr. He added that Iran had also agreed to provide cheap electricity from its own grid to southern Iraq, and to build a large power plant essentially free of charge in an area between the two southern Shiite holy cities of Karbala and Najaf.

Iraqi Contracts With Iran and China Concern U.S. - New York Times

Bartle Bull has a remarkable essay in this month's Prospect (the UK cousin to the American liberal magazine). He argues that Iraq is well on its way toward political reconciliation -- indeed, most of the "fighting" now taking place does so in salon bull sessions and cabinet meetings -- and that the military conflict is dwindling to a containable level. 

As difficult as it has been, especially given the follies of the current administration, to take the long view on Iraq, even veteran war critics have grudgingly conceded the unexpected good news of late: from the Anbar Awakening to the precipitous drop in civilian casualties in the last few months, to the almost superhuman stoicism of the Kurds, who at any time could declare their own independent state but choose instead to abide by the federalist model enshrined in Iraq's constitution. A "civil war" is not attended by a stalled but still legitimate national government going about its business.

Bull's most insightful comment, I think, is that the Sunni insurgency has realized it cannot possibly win in battle against 85% of the population (more, if you count those Sunnis completely disillusioned by their IED-wielding co-sectarians.)  Instead, the insurgency has focussed its efforts on winning the headlines in the New York Times, in which it now competes for our despondency against the murder-by-numbers mercenaries of Blackwater USA. 

The world held its breath after Samarra: here, we thought, comes the cataclysm, the civil war that many had feared and that others had sought for three years. But it never happened. The Shia backlash in parts of Baghdad was vicious, and the Sunnis were more or less kicked out of much of the city. But over 18 months later, it is clear that the Shias were too sensible to go all the way. It was never a civil war: no battle lines or uniforms, no secession, no attempt to seize power or impose constitutional change, no parallel governments, not even any public leaders or aims. The Sunnis rolled the dice, launched the battle of Baghdad and lost. Now they are begging for an accommodation with Shia Iraq.

What is the evidence for this? This summer, Maliki's office reached out to Baathist ex-soldiers and officers and received 48,600 requests for jobs in uniform; he made room for 5,000 of them, found civil service jobs for another 7,000, and put the rest of them on a full pension. Meanwhile leading Baathists have told Time magazine they want to be in the government; the 1920 Revolution Brigade—a Sunni insurgent group—is reportedly patrolling the streets of Diyala with the 3rd infantry division, and the Sunni Islamic Army in Iraq is telling al Jazeera it may negotiate with the Americans. The anecdotes coming out of Baghdad confirm the trend. The drawing rooms of the capital's dealmakers are full of Baathists, cap in hand. They are terrified of the Shia death squads and want to share in the pie when the oil starts flowing. Both Izzat al-Douri, the more prestigious of the two main Baathist leaders, and Mohamed Younis al Ahmed, the more lethal, have been reaching out from neighbouring countries to negotiate an accommodation. Since the summer, the news coming out on the Sunni front has consistently been in this one, inevitable direction.

If you think any of this is shocking, by the way, you should check out the reader discussion of the piece in First Drafts, Prospect's blog. Compare the cool-headed sophistication -- even in disagreement with the author -- against the upset tummies that daily disgorge themselves in the Guardian's comment threads. 

Andrew Tilghman of the Washington Monthly has a well-argued piece that suggests the role and influence of Al Qaeda in Iraq is a fraction of what official estimates (read: White House and Pentagon stats) claim:

How big, then, is AQI? The most persuasive estimate I've heard comes from Malcolm Nance, the author of The Terrorists of Iraq and a twenty-year intelligence veteran and Arabic speaker who has worked with military and intelligence units tracking al-Qaeda inside Iraq. He believes AQI includes about 850 full-time fighters, comprising 2 percent to 5 percent of the Sunni insurgency. "Al-Qaeda in Iraq," according to Nance, "is a microscopic terrorist organization."

Tilghman also provides evidence that the Golden Mosque bombing -- which Ayman al-Zawahiri all but castigated his lieutenant, the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, for carrying out* -- was actually a sophisticated demolition job of former Baathists:

The man who the military believe orchestrated the bombing, an Iraqi named Haitham al-Badri, was both a Samara native and a former high-ranking government official under Saddam Hussein. (His right-hand man, Hamed Jumaa Farid al-Saeedi, was also a former military intelligence officer in Saddam Hussein's army.) Key features of the bombing did not conform to the profile of an AQI attack. For example, the bombers did not target civilians, or even kill the Shiite Iraqi army soldiers guarding the mosque, both of which are trademark tactics of AQI. The planners also employed sophisticated explosive devices, suggesting formal military training common among former regime officers, rather than the more bluntly destructive tactics typical of AQI. Finally, Samara was the heart of Saddam's power base, where former regime fighters keep tight control over the insurgency.

However, this begs a further question: If Saddamists were responsible for the most devastating symbolic attack on Iraqi civil society since the war began, did they not foresee that it would lead to Shia death squads and a possible genocide of Sunnis? How does the old regime presume to retake power (its one true goal) if it ignites a civil war that will likely devour its already minuscule ethnic base? Zarqawi had a much clearer motive in razing the holy shrine: It was only holy to a sect of Muslims he believed were polytheistic and thus no better than atheists, Christians or Jews. His vision was decidedly less realist than regime dead-enders; he salivated for a regional war that would cull fighters from all corners of the Middle East and culminate in a 21st century caliphate. This is why his bosses in Waziristan tried to rein him in.

Tilghman also admits that if any cross-pollination between AQI and the Saddamists has taken place, then it is the former that are joining the larger ranks of the latter. He quotes Nance: "Al-Qaeda can't operate anywhere in Iraq without kissing the ring of the former regime."

AQI recruits often find themselves taking orders from a network of former regime insurgents, who assemble their car bombs and tell them what to blow up. They become, as Nance says, "puppets for the other insurgent groups."

So there is every reason to believe that, even if AQI is as small a force as Tlighman imagines, it is still responsible for executing the violent designs of the Baathist leadership. This makes it something of a vanguard force of the insurgency worth taking seriously, doesn't it?

More telling is what Dan Murphy of the Christian Science Monitor reports today: That Al Qaeda is, apart from atrophied, almost non-existent in Iraq -- not because it never was there, but because it has been soundly beaten:

The Brookings Institution's Iraq index, which monitors security indicators in the country, appears to back up Mr. Crocker's assessment. In its latest report, the index found that the flow of foreign fighters to Iraq has dropped from about 85 to about 50 over several recent months. US officials say the number of suicide bombings in Iraq has fallen from more than 60 in January to about 30 a month since July.

Suicide-bombings are the worst kinds of attacks because the perpetrators can't be captured or interrogated, and thus their affiliations are always open to speculation and paranoia. Though AQI has made suicide bombing its heinous specialty, so a 50% reduction in attacks per month is, even for a tiny organization, a stark sign of that organization's attrition. Moreover, if the Mujahadeen Army of Iraq -- another Sunni terrorist outfit but with nationalist rather than imperialist aims -- is responsible for any number of those suicide-bombings, then the above suggests they're being defeated as well.

* See Zawahiri's letter to Zarqawi. He doesn't address the Golden Mosque atrocity directly, but the pedantic rhetorical questions he asks of his man in Mesopotamia seem to hint at it: "If the attacks on Shia leaders were necessary to put a stop to their plans, then why were there attacks on ordinary Shia? Won't this lead to reinforcing false ideas in their minds, even as it is incumbent on us to preach the call of Islam to them and explain and communicate to guide them to the truth? And can the mujahedeen kill all of the Shia in Iraq? Has any Islamic state in history ever tried that? And why kill ordinary Shia considering that they are forgiven because of their ignorance? And what loss will befall us if we did not attack the Shia? And do the brothers forget that we have more than one hundred prisoners - many of whom are from the leadership who are wanted in their countries - in the custody of the Iranians? And even if we attack the Shia out of necessity, then why do you announce this matter and make it public, which compels the Iranians to take counter measures? And do the brothers forget that both we and the Iranians need to refrain from harming each other at this time in which the Americans are targeting us?"

I disagree with him about the necessity and legitimacy of mercenaries fighting alongside comparatively underpaid U.S. soldiers. And I'd have less of a problem if Blackwater, DynCorp International and Triple Canopy were deputized in some way that they became the equivalents of MPs and thus fell under martial jurisdiction.

Boot underplays the significance the Blackwater scandal has had on native perceptions of our continuing mission in Iraq. (It hardly matters that the worst-case depiction of the Sept. 16 shootings emanate from the Sadrists in the Ministry of the Interior. There are still 17 corpses and 24 wounded bodies that Blackwater and the U.S. government must answer for.) Also, is it really wise to be rah-rahing a private army that hasn't lost a man under its charge precisely because that army is not beholden to strict ethical standards of warfare?

The surge, let's not forget, had a powerful psychological concomitant of boosting Iraqi morale by securing neighborhoods long enough to allow civilians to build infrastructure, found small businesses and join police squads. It becomes harder to convince Iraqis that the Yanks with guns are buying the country time to allow for these developments when 18,000 of those Yanks can shoot people without consequence.

Boot at least sees the dire situation as it now stands:

It is outrageous that almost no American contractors have been held criminally liable for conduct in Iraq or Afghanistan, but hundreds of soldiers have been court-martialed. You can't blame this shortcoming on the security firms; they don't have the power to send their own employees to jail.

The problem is that there is a gray zone in the law when it comes to contractors on foreign battlefields. Congress has passed legislation to make clear that contractors fall within the Uniform Code of Military Justice as well as civilian law (the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act), but neither the Department of Justice nor the Judge Advocate General's Corps has shown much enthusiasm for enforcing these rules. That needs to change.

I'd quite like to see a list of names of State Department personnel who may have left the public sector for jobs at Blackwater USA since 2003. Free enterprise, when it involves life-or-death decisions in war, should be dramatically less free.

Accept the Blackwater mercenaries - Los Angeles Times

Don't let's get too carried away with headlines like these. It may be that codename Curveball's stories about biological weapons in Iraq were drummed up to bolster his case for asylum, and you can be sure no small number of web surfers will glance across their Yahoo front page and shake their head in knowing disapproval of the fascistic, hegemonic Amerikkka. But is that fair when the entire subtext of the story is that living under the regime was so terrible that an Iraqi citizen would fabricate stories about their involvement in WMD production to the dual ends of provoking an overthrow of the regime and getting the hell out?

Curveball has been repeatedly discredited by investigations of the
United States' faulty prewar intelligence and became an embarrassment
to U.S. spy agencies. A presidential intelligence commission found that
Curveball, who mostly told his stories to German intelligence officials who passed them on to the U.S., was a fabricator and an alcoholic.

"60 Minutes"
reports that Alwan arrived at a German refugee center in 1999 and began
spinning his tales of a facility making mobile biological weapons in an
effort to gain asylum. The ploy apparently achieved his goal, and Alwan
is assumed to be living in Germany today under an assumed name.

Good for him. I hope he's enjoying a hefty stein of Bräu-Hell somewhere (it's surprising a lifetime under Saddam didn't drive more folks to the bottle, and to lie to intelligence agencies in order to escape). You could almost go so far as to say this strengthens the case for regime change...

The article goes on to discuss the administration's use of his testimony:

Although German intelligence officials warned the CIA that Curveball's
claims of mobile bioweapons labs were unreliable, and U.N. inspectors
determined before the war began in 2003 that parts of his story were
false, the Bush administration continued to promote the existence of
such mobile labs for months after the invasion, until it was widely
accepted that they could not be found.

But nobody needed to hear horror stories from Curveball. It's now widely known that Hussein convinced even most of his top military officers of the existence of WMD stockpiles. This bluff (which we now know to be a bluff only because we had a look for ourselves) was as integral to maintaining the Iraqi military's confidence in its own capabilities as it was to threatening neighboring states. It's a pity more people aren't thankful we no longer have to speculate on this matter, or take the word of desperate Iraqis who will do anything for a chance to booze it up in peace. It's easy enough to say this while saying that the war itself has failed on many other counts, and while holding our leaders accountable for those failures.

It would be wonderful if military intelligence were a matter of sheer empirical evidence, if it was all testable and falsifiable, tangible and one hundred percent precise. It isn't. Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor's illuminating book Cobra II relates an instance from the hours before the war against the regime when a very difficult bombing mission was carried out in the hopes of decapitating the dictatorship first thing. It was a risky move, one that could have potentially endangered both a complex set of attack plans and the soldiers carrying them out. The mission was unsuccessful because the intelligence turned out to be faulty. Nothing shady, no conspiracy, just bad intel.

The point of this isn't to apologize for the Bush administration, who should have skipped the WMD issue entirely when making their case for regime change and skipped directly to the desperate Iraqis part. The point is that the focus should be on sympathy for why a fellow like Curveball might have done what he did. Once that's sufficiently in place, the headlines have a different ring.

The Times and WaPo lead with a story about a particularly bloody day for the private security firm Blackwater. Here's what the U.S. embassy in Iraq has uncovered so far:  On September 16, a car bomb exploded about a mile northwest of the Green Zone, the target being one "principal" (unidentified government figure) who was under the protection of Blackwater. He then was evacuated by another Blackwater team that drove in from the Green Zone.

In the middle of the firefight, according to the report, the other tactical support team, TST 22, was ordered back out of the Green Zone to assist TST 23 in Nisoor Square, identified in the document as Gray 87.

TST 23 had managed to flee the scene before TST 22 got there, meaning that the latter, which had already reached the point of safety, came back to face the melee by itself.

Some U.S. officials have questioned why the Blackwater team decided to evacuate the principal and return to the Green Zone, rather than remaining inside the compound. "It doesn't make sense," said one U.S. official. "Why would they go back out there when they were already safe?"

A failure of communications? Concern over damaged property? Who knows. But this episode underscores the need to keep mercenaries out of a war zone, or, at the very minimum, to make sure that their activities are constantly monitored by Multi-National Forces-Iraq. 

As a Trotskyist, he should be used to fighting losing struggles. As an architect, he demands order, cohesion, discipline. A bundle of contradictions, perhaps, but this profile of Kanan Makiya is the saddest thing I've read in a long time: 

Makiya is a brilliant and fearless thinker; he dissected a brutal dictatorship and, later, exploded the pieties of his own intellectual culture. And so it is the very shakiness of his answers that suggest that they are, in the end, not about his intellect at all. They’re about his heart. In this case, it seems, Makiya’s heart — his passion to destroy Hussein, his passion to bring freedom to Iraq — does not want him to go where his intellect would take him.

And where would it go? What would it say? Possibly something like this: You exposed a terrible dictatorship, and for the noblest of motives you signed on to an invasion that ended in catastrophe. You misjudged your native country, and your adopted one too.

Our Sufi neocon baba gives a potted history of the land in which Orwell served as a colonial civil servant and concludes that Chinese intervention isn't the answer:

Some Western pundits have argued that a China now oriented toward capitalist growth has an incentive to dissuade the Burmese army from administering a bloodbath. Such optimism about Beijing, however, is vain.The only hope for the rescue of the tormented peoples of Burma resides in the solidarity expressed by President George W. Bush at the U.N. General Assembly when he said, "Americans are outraged by the situation in Burma. The ruling junta remains unyielding, yet the people's desire for freedom is unmistakable."
 
Cynics may decry the president's stand as a mere effort to renew the vision of democratization that accompanied U.S. intervention in Iraq. But Burma--like Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzia before it--shows that the weak links in the global chain of tyranny are breaking, one by one, and that the worldwide movement for entrepreneurship, accountability, and popular sovereignty can assert itself, with or without the help of outsiders. For Americans and all haters of oppression, the message is clear: The United States should show effective support for the aspirations of Burma's diverse citizens; tougher sanctions against the regime are only the beginning.  

Iraq's Prime Minister Jalal Talabani and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the majoritarian party SCIRI, are both out of the country for health-related reasons. Talabani's in the U.S. on a severe diet regimen (the only characteristic he shared with Ariel Sharon is the girth) and Hakim is in Iran undergoing chemotherapy for lung cancer.

Yet more fodder for the "Bomb Iran" comments thread: it's not an option while the Ed Gillespie of the Iraqi Shia is in a Tehran hospital. The Washington Times:

He chose treatment in Iran rather than the U.S. because he wanted to be close to his family and proper treatment was not available in Iraq, party officials said. His choice of Iran also reflected his close links to the Shi'ite theocracy there.
    

Mr. al-Hakim's absence could last several months or longer, said the officials, robbing Iraq of a key player at a time when the United States is pressing for parliamentary action on a series of political "benchmarks" in support of its military surge in Baghdad. 

This Guardian cover story is all over the blogosphere:

The official said US commanders were bracing for a nationwide, Iranian-orchestrated summer offensive, linking al-Qaida and Sunni insurgents to Tehran's Shia militia allies, that Iran hoped would trigger a political mutiny in Washington and a US retreat. "We expect that al-Qaida and Iran will both attempt to increase the propaganda and increase the violence prior to Petraeus's report in September [when the US commander General David Petraeus will report to Congress on President George Bush's controversial, six-month security "surge" of 30,000 troop reinforcements]," the official said.

Juan Cole thinks it's extraordinary that the Shia Islamic Republic would suborn Sunni jihadists, let alone target fellow Shia whom it has armed and trained:

At a time when Sunni Arab guerrillas are said to be opposing "al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia" for its indiscriminate violence against Iraqis, including Shiites, we are now expected to believe that Shiite Iran is allying with it. And, it claims that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards are shelling the Green Zone. The parliament building that was hit to day by such shelling is dominated by the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council and its paramilitary, the Badr Organization. Who trained Badr? The Iranian Revolutionary Guards. And they are trying to hit their own guys . . . why?

Why not? If the Badr Organization and Mahdi Army are seen by Tehran as making overtures to the Multinational Forces-Iraq, why not strike at your own minions to scare them into compliance? Sadr targets his fellow Mahdi riffraff when he thinks they grown too big for their britches and refuse to obey his commands.

And a Shia-Sunni jihadist alliance of convenience is hardly a new phenomenon. Far more startling than it is that a Mideast "expert" like Juan Cole finds it startling.

Out of a shared antagonism for Israel, Iran reportedly gave $50 million to Hamas in 2006 after the (Sunni) Islamist party gained control of the Palestinian government, whose total operating budget is $120 million.

Time for another bake sale, AIPAC.

The opening frame of a new Al Qaeda video, which warns of imminent terrorist attacks on the U.S. 

Philip Carter lays out a step-by-step withdrawal protocol for getting our troops out of Iraq. The only variable he leaves out, of course, is the most important: the time line. Carter writes as if this were how to get the entire U.S. presence (soldiers, ancillary military personnel and private contractors) to skedaddle from the country at once. That wouldn't happen even if tomorrow Bush declared, "Screw you guys, we're going home." Phased withdrawal is a redundancy since any withdrawal of this scale would take place over the course of weeks and months, if only to account for security concerns. It's easy to plant IEDs and snipe at Americans when you know the roads all of them have to travel to leave: the alacrity with which we entered Iraq was due to fighting a mostly disappeared conventional army, not a ragtag, shadow-dwelling insurgency.

Anyway, worth a gander if only for hypothetical reasons:

It took three weeks to fight from Kuwait up to Baghdad, but that was with terrible weather and intense fighting. The withdrawal would likely go much faster, although it would hinge on two variables. The first is the pace set by military commanders for the move, who will likely choose something on a spectrum between rapid chaotic withdrawal and a slow, phased withdrawal over several months. The second variable is the "throughput" problem: Literally, how many of the 300,000 troops, civilians, and contractors in Iraq can squeeze through the airfields and seaports of Iraq and Kuwait to come home? Even if commanders dictate a rapid pullout, it may take weeks or months to bring everyone home from Kuwait and the Persian Gulf region.

By a member of the 9/11 Commission and a vocal opponent of the current administration: 

No matter how incompetent the Bush administration and no matter how poorly they chose their words to describe themselves and their political opponents, Iraq was a larger national security risk after Sept. 11 than it was before. And no matter how much we might want to turn the clock back and either avoid the invasion itself or the blunders that followed, we cannot. The war to overthrow Saddam Hussein is over. What remains is a war to overthrow the government of Iraq.

Some who have been critical of this effort from the beginning have consistently based their opposition on their preference for a dictator we can control or contain at a much lower cost. From the start they said the price tag for creating an environment where democracy could take root in Iraq would be high. Those critics can go to sleep at night knowing they were right.

The critics who bother me the most are those who ordinarily would not be on the side of supporting dictatorships, who are arguing today that only military intervention can prevent the genocide of Darfur, or who argued yesterday for military intervention in Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda to ease the sectarian violence that was tearing those places apart.

Not quite, but Joe Klein reports on noticeable improvements in combating Al Qaeda in Iraq:

A senior U.S. military official told me—confirming reports from several other sources—that there have been "a couple of days recently during which there were zero effective attacks and less than 10 attacks overall in the province (keep in mind that an attack can be as little as one round fired). This is a result of sheiks stepping up and opposing AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq] and volunteering their young men to serve in the police and army units there." The success in Anbar has led sheiks in at least two other Sunni-dominated provinces, Nineveh and Salahaddin, to ask for similar alliances against the foreign fighters. And, as TIME's Bobby Ghosh has reported, an influential leader of the Sunni insurgency, Harith al-Dari, has turned against al-Qaeda as well. It is possible that al-Qaeda is being rejected like a mismatched liver transplant by the body of the Iraqi insurgency.

Those who say the solution in Iraq lies in politics, not military strategy, are right for the wrong reason: The politics is built-into the military strategy at the ground level. Under David Petraeus's thoughtful command, MNF-I are learning how to navigate the sticky tribalism of Sunni regions where jihadists have become parasites of convenience. As Klein adds,

[A]n alliance with the tribes was proposed by U.S. Army intelligence officers as early as October 2003 and rejected by L. Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority on the grounds that "tribes are part of the past. They have no place in the new democratic Iraq." The damage caused by that myopic stupidity may never be repaired: it gave al-Qaeda a base in the Sunni tribal areas, which enabled the sustained, spectacular anti-Shi'ite bombing campaign, which, along with the Sunnis' historic disdain for the Shi'ite majority, created the conditions for the current civil war.

Any optimism, however, should be tempered by a dogged awareness that much of the good work now being done in this failed state is merely the undoing of much of the bad work done over the last four years. 

For all his intelligence, eloquence and charisma, Barack Obama still has miles to go before he can match war-chat with John McCain. Here's what he published earlier:

"This country is united in our support for our troops, but we also owe them a plan to relieve them of the burden of policing someone else's civil war. Governor Romney and Senator McCain clearly believe the course we are on in Iraq is working, but I do not.

"And if there ever was a reflection of that it's the fact that Senator McCain required a flack jacket, ten armored Humvees, two Apache attack helicopters, and 100 soldiers with rifles by his side to stroll through a market in Baghdad just a few weeks ago.

"Governor Romney and Senator McCain are still supporting a war that has cost us thousands of lives, made us less safe in the world, and resulted in a resurgence of al-Qaeda. It is time to end this war so that we can redeploy our forces to focus on the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 and all those who plan to do us harm."

Can you spot the red meat for a Republican challenger, much less a vetaran? A typo-ridden blog may not be the best place to throw down such a challenge, but McCain was no slouch:

"While Senator Obama's two years in the U.S. Senate certainly entitle him to vote against funding our troops, my service and experience combined with conversations with military leaders on the ground in Iraq lead me to believe that we must give this new strategy a chance to succeed because the consequences of failure would be catastrophic to our nation's security."

"By the way, Senator Obama, it's a 'flak' jacket, not a 'flack' jacket."

And for good sissy/hippie-boy measure, a McCain aide added: "Obama wouldn't know the difference between an RPG and a bong."

(All via Jonathan Martin)

In an inexpensive necklace of non sequiturs, Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald tries to take issue with Joe Klein's report of security improvements in Anbar Province for the fact that Klein relies on anonymous sources:

As always, the very idea of granting anonymity to government sources to do nothing other than repeat pro-government claims is both manipulative and moronic on its face. What possible journalistic value could there ever be in cloaking someone with anonymity in order to say something that Tony Snow would happily say, and does say, every day from the White House Press Briefing Room?

Greenwald of course doesn't refute anything in Klein's piece, which was actually more modest about the successes in routing Al Qaeda, as I already mentioned here. But notice our hero's main plaint, which he even goes to the trouble of highlighting in bold for us: Information is suspect not because it comes from nameless government officials but because it bolsters the government's position.

I knew I'd get lucky if I typed in "Glenn Greenwald" and "Sy Hersh" into Google. Sure enough, Greenwald places a lot of credence in the New Yorker reporter's work, particularly this much-bruited article from April 2006 which suggested that the Bush administration was plotting an attack on Iran. Greenwald even added an epilogue to his bestselling book How Would a Patriot Act? to incorporate Hersh's findings. What kind of sources did Hersh rely on?

A government consultant with close ties to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon;

One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the Bush Administration;

One military planner;

one high-ranking diplomat;

A senior Pentagon adviser on the war on terror

That's just from page one of the online version.

Source anonymity is fine in Greenwald's book -- it violates no precept of journalistic ethics -- as long as the sources train an unflattering light on the shadow-bathed intrigues of a warmongering president.

On IMs, a good friend and Reservesman poses this solution for an end to the fighting in Iraq:

I will put plush penguins on my hummvee, who would shoot at a Penguin

"What is wrong Ahmad, why do you hesitate"

"I am sorry Said, hey I am all about destroying the imperialist infidel puppets of Zion, I mean I even minored in Insurgency in college, but I just cannot shoot that penguin, look at him, Said, he looks like he is wearing a tuxedo! Such cuteness surely must please God"

"Yes Ahmad I know, I have not felt like making IEDs since watching the "Feet of Happiness"

"yes let us return back to Secret Terrorist Hideout, I need to check my MySpace anyway and if we hurry we can catch the rest of Mesopotamian Idol"

"Oh I love that show! But it saddens me each year when we must stone the winner"

"Well you know our policy on Idols, but hey at least they get a record deal out of it"

"Yes Have you heard Taylor Hicks and Osama bin Laden's new CD? 'Duets from the Minarets' I have been rocking it all week"

"check out track 5: Shi'a Bop"

"Hummvee like the Wolf"

"Enjoy the Silencer"

"How Sunni is Now"

"Hi-5ing an Arab"

Now how much more ominous would this have been had there not been an American garrison stationed nearby to prevent a full-scale invasion?  

ANKARA, Turkey (AP) - Several thousand Turkish troops crossed into northern Iraq early Wednesday to chase Kurdish guerrillas who operate from bases there, Turkish security officials told The Associated Press.

Two senior security officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media, said the raid was limited in scope and that it did not constitute the kind of large incursion that Turkish leaders have been discussing in recent weeks.

"It is not a major offensive and the number of troops is not in the tens of thousands," one of the officials told the AP by telephone. The official is based in southeast Turkey, where the military has been battling separatist Kurdish rebels since they took up arms in 1984.

The U.S. military said it could not confirm the reports but was "very concerned."

The cabinet had to compose this with almost a third of its members absent due to sectarian boycotts. Still, this agreement was hatched with the full cooperation of the Kurdistan Regional Government, and seems demographically fair:

The net revenue, after deducting the expenses of the Federal Government for delivering its federal duties and funding any agreed strategic projects, will be shared between Kurdistan and the governorates not organized as regions. Kurdistan will receive 17% of the net revenue, and the balance will be used, according to the population distribution, to meet the needs of the governorates.

No guarantees, though, on whether the Oil Law will be approved by parliament.  Nevertheless, it's the most important piece of legislation Iraq can pass in coming months, and deserves more attention stateside.

Even the Times, which juxtaposes its report on this development with a photograph of two kids performing a mock execution of a third, can't call up a more cynical quote than this:

Representatives of the Sunni bloc said that they were not opposed to the law, but that there were a number of aspects they wanted to discuss.

“We are astonished at the government’s rush to submit the law to Parliament,” said Salim Abdulla, a member of the Sunni bloc, known as Tawaffuk.

“We were waiting to finish with the constitutional amendments to make sure there is no contradiction between the oil law and the constitution,” he said. “We will not be an obstacle in the road of the law, but we have some comments and reservations.”

Pretty conciliatory by Sunni bloc standards, wouldn't you say?  Dinars talk. 

I'm sure the leader writers of the New York Times have waited as patiently as they claim for signs of real improvement in the administration's war strategy. But this last lapsed deadline for "milestones" -- all of which have failed to be achieved -- has got them throwing up their hands in terminal frustration. It's time to leave Iraq and let the skies fall, if they must.

Am I the only one who gets the impression the Times editorial board isn't terribly concerned about the bloody aftermath of their bring-them-home-now proposal, judging by this sentence? "At first, we believed that after destroying Iraq’s government, army, police and economic structures, the United States was obliged to try to accomplish some of the goals Mr. Bush claimed to be pursuing, chiefly building a stable, unified Iraq." It's almost as if stability and unification were the only elements missing from Mesopotamia prior to 2003.

Setting a firm date might, according to this editorial, force "Iraq’s leaders — knowing that they can no longer rely on the Americans to guarantee their survival — [to] be more open to compromise, perhaps to a Bosnian-style partition, with economic resources fairly shared but with millions of Iraqis forced to relocate. That would be better than the slow-motion ethnic and religious cleansing that has contributed to driving one in seven Iraqis from their homes." That "perhaps" does more work than the absence of any mention of how ethnic and religious cleansing would be redoubled in the event of our army's departure, or fall-back to permanent but scattered garrisons in Iraqi Kurdistan and the Shia-dominant south.

No biggie. This much-discussed op-ed, given the sententious and misleading Cormac McCarthyesque title "The Road Home" (it's to be airlifts all the way), arrives too late and with no new information to be of great moment. Joe Klein has recently written in Time that a de facto deadline for troop withdrawal -- or rather the declaration of U.S. military defeat, has long been established, whether or not an incompetent president acknowledges it or not:

There is another clock, not often mentioned, that sits in the Pentagon. It is the Broken Army clock, the service timeline for an exhausted force. Petraeus and his staff were deeply concerned when rumors of another tour extension, from the current 15 months for soldiers, spread in mid-June. "It would be a last resort," Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told reporters — but troop morale is so iffy that Petraeus quietly urged his commanders to "get the word out" to their soldiers that the extension rumors were false.

As the matter stands, the actual "surge" hasn't yet begun. We've only just imported the sufficient number of troops for Gen. Petraeus's counterinsurgency doctrine to be put into full effect, and his Operation Phantom Thunder is only just beginning. As Frederick Kagan, the main articulator the surge policy, puts it like this in the Weekly Standard:

[P]revious clearing operations in Iraq were not part of a coherent plan to establish security in a wide area, but rather reactions to violence in particular places. Thus, U.S. commanders made no extensive efforts to contain the accelerants to violence--vehicle-bomb factories, insurgent safe houses, training grounds, smuggling routes, and weapons caches--located outside the cities being cleared. By contrast, the current strategy aims to establish security across greater Baghdad, and Petraeus and Odierno have added a phase between the preparation phase and the major clearing. This is Operation Phantom Thunder, which aims to disrupt enemy networks for many miles beyond the capital, as far away as Baquba and Falluja. What's more, Phantom Thunder is striking the enemy in almost all of its major bases at once--something Coalition forces have never before attempted in Iraq.

And John Burns, whose own newspaper doesn't really deserve him, has a cautious but encouraging article about the success of turning Sunni tribal networks against Al Qaeda in areas like Ramadi, the Amariya district in Baghdad, and the notorious Triangle of Death.

When I first investigated in this magazine Gen. Petraeus and his plan for revolutionizing the nature of combat in Iraq, I said that the full measure of his success would not be evident, if at all, for at least a year. It has been five months so far. This strikes me as preferable to the Times' fingers-crossed endorsement of the worst colonial exit strategy for the Middle East, or anywhere: divide and quit.

With 140,000 troops. That's how many Turkey has amassed at the border of Iraqi Kurdistan in its preparation for a full-scale "incursion" into that sovereign territory. The stated objective is to root out members of the Stalinoid PKK terrorist organization. We have 160,000 troops in the whole of Iraq. Subtract them, and I wonder what will stay Ankara's hand...

For those unfamiliar with Small Wars Journal, it's simply the best resource on the military and tactical nature of the Iraq crisis. In response to Operation Phantom Thunder -- the official name of the second phase of the "surge" -- contributor Malcolm Nance has an unmissable post that should be read in full. How effective a strategy is it, exactly, to call Al Qaeda the number one enemy and tout local tribal elements' turn against it?

It is well documented that the Sunni insurgency is composed of three wings of insurgents. It is composed of the nationalist Former Regime Loyalists (FRLs) and their former military elements (FREs). This force may be upwards to 29,000 active combatants carrying out over 100 unconventional attacks per day using improvised explosive devices, rockets and automatic weapons ambushes. The FRL-originated Jaysh al-Mujahideen is composed of former Saddam Fedayeen, Special Republican Guard intelligence officers, former-Ba'athists, Sunni volunteers and their families. The second wing is the nationalist Iraqi Religious Extremists (IREs). These are forces including the Islamic Army of Iraq, Ansar al-Sunnah and other smaller groups, which may total approximately 5,000 fighters, sprinkled throughout western, central and northern Iraq. On occasion come into the conversation when one of their attacks is particularly daring or when the coalition claims it is negotiating their departure from the battlefront. Inevitably these “lesser” insurgent groups are portrayed as bit players on the sidelines of the epic.

Finally, the foreign fighters of the Al Qaeda in Iraq and its umbrella group the Islamic Emirate of Iraq (aka Islamic State of Iraq) may be as few as 1,500 fighters and supporters and may also have direct links to the two other tiers. Overwhelming evidence exists that that the FRLs have been waging the lion’s share of the insurgency. Until 2004 they were considered a separate part of the insurgency but recently they have been called ‘Al Qaeda-associated’ because AQI was operating in their area of operations … by 2007 it wasn’t hard for Washington to make a semantic and rhetorical leap to refer to all insurgency forces as “Al Qaeda.”

Also worth noting in Nance's post is the following statement of fact, often forgotten in the "All lies. All the time." meme:

It must be remembered that Zarqawi’s original AQ backed group Tawheed Wal Jihad came into Iraq just days before the invasion and set up in Fallujah under control of the Saddam Fedayeen. The Iraqi Baath party grew from a covert political organization and its current adherents still operate as “neo-Ba'athists” in Damascus and Latakia, Syria; Cairo, Egypt and even the UAE. The FRLs are operating as a covert intelligence and Fedayeen driven terrorist force, just as they were in the 1950 and 60s before they overthrew the government of Abd al-Karim Qasim and took power. Having had decades of experience researching the lives of the population, they are even more dangerous as their knowledge of the political and personal dynamics in Iraq runs deep. When necessary they have AQI, organized criminals and other forces to assist them...

Many supporters of the ‘All AQI. All the time.’ meme have limited knowledge of Iraq before the war. The former regime intelligence and paramilitary forces were active for years prior to the war perfecting numerous types of unconventional weapons, which are used extensively throughout the insurgency. In each instance, these systems were first developed and deploy by the FRLs in both the invasion and post-war insurgency. Take beheading for example. Largely attributed to AQI and Zarqawi there was in fact an extensive use of it in 2000 and 2001 by the Saddam Fedayeen. They were tasked to carryout an “anti-prostitution” campaign that targeted against political opponents. They publicly beheaded over 200 wives and women family members of Saddam’s enemies. Videos of the brutal beheadings could be found on the streets of Baghdad for less than .25 cents a full year before AQI carried out their first beheading.

If it needs added comment, the Fedayeen Saddam were up to no good before Zarqawi got to Iraq. This is from a Foreign Affairs article, "Saddam's Delusions: The View From the Inside," published a little over a year ago:

The Saddam Fedayeen also took part in the regime's domestic terrorism operations and planned for attacks throughout Europe and the Middle East. In a document dated May 1999, Saddam's older son, Uday, ordered preparations for "special operations, assassinations, and bombings, for the centers and traitor symbols in London, Iran and the self-ruled areas [Kurdistan]." Preparations for "Blessed July," a regime-directed wave of "martyrdom" operations against targets in the West, were well under way at the time of the coalition invasion.

Damn. If only the coalition had stayed home... Saddam would have called off "Blessed July," Zarqawi would have camel-hopped it back to Jordan to try his hand at antique sales on eBay, and all would be right with the Middle East.

Bob Woodward's four-page article on the CIA Director Michael V. Hayden's surmise of Iraq's potential:

He compared the Iraq situation to the prolonged warfare in the Balkans. "In Bosnia, the parties fought themselves to exhaustion," Hayden said, suggesting that the same scenario could play out in Iraq. "They might just have to fight this out to exhaustion."

Hayden catalogued what he saw as the main sources of violence in this order: the insurgency, sectarian strife, criminality, general anarchy and, lastly, al-Qaeda. Though Hayden had listed al-Qaeda as the fifth most pressing threat in Iraq, Bush regularly lists al-Qaeda first.

Even giving Hayden the benefit of the doubt (and the organization he oversees and its conclusions are more deserving of intense skepticism), the question then becomes: If Iraq is like Bosnia, then what would a withdrawal of U.S. forces do but hasten a genocide? Is it not better to have a protectionist force in country that, however enervated it might be, will still stand in the way of that country's self-cannibalization?

As for the true threat of Al Qaeda, of course it's been easier for the president to use it as a soundbite metonym for "bad guys" despite the situation on the ground being much more complicated. In case you think this contradiction comes at only the administration's expense, consider that those on the other side of the debate who say that Iraq only ever became a cynosure for Al Qaeda after the coalition invaded don't hesitate to then minimize the threat of Al Qaeda in Iraq. It's easy to score points against Bush by citing both arguments, virtually in the same breath.

Of course, every once in a while, the president offers an accurate assessment of the menace our troops face daily, as he did in 2005 in a speech before the U.S. Naval Academy:

The enemy in Iraq is a combination of rejectionists, Saddamists and terrorists. The rejectionists are by far the largest group. These are ordinary Iraqis, mostly Sunni Arabs, who miss the privileged status they had under the regime of Saddam Hussein -- and they reject an Iraq in which they are no longer the dominant group.

Not all Sunnis fall into the rejectionist camp. Of those that do, most are not actively fighting us -- but some give aid and comfort to the enemy. Many Sunnis boycotted the January elections -- yet as democracy takes hold in Iraq, they are recognizing that opting out of the democratic process has hurt their interests. And today, those who advocate violent opposition are being increasingly isolated by Sunnis who choose peaceful participation in the democratic process. Sunnis voted in the recent constitutional referendum in large numbers -- and Sunni coalitions have formed to compete in next month's elections -- or, this month's elections. We believe that, over time, most rejectionists will be persuaded to support a democratic Iraq led by a federal government that is a strong enough government to protect minority rights.

The second group that makes up the enemy in Iraq is smaller, but more determined. It contains former regime loyalists who held positions of power under Saddam Hussein -- people who still harbor dreams of ret