Iraqi women being trained as spies.

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Morrissey at Hot Air notes that families are being evacuated from Sadr City in Baghdad, so the Iraqis may be getting ready to drive out the last of the Sadr militia and many of the Iranian-financed thugs.

Since Sadr refused to disband the militia, Maliki has little choice but to root it out and destroy it. The US and Iraqi forces have already started doing that by building barriers to keep the Mahdis locked into known positions, with some skirmishes already taking place in Sadr City. Now that they have the battleground defined, the next step will be the military action that will end the Mahdi Army as an organization and establish lawful control over the last of the rebel ground Sadr controls.

This will likely take weeks to complete. Once the battle starts, expect to read and hear plenty of media reports emphasizing civilian deaths, setbacks in the battle, defections in the Iraqi Army, and statements of defiance from Sadr. What we won’t hear is progress by Maliki and the US in finishing off Sadr’s forces until it suddenly becomes impossible to ignore it — and then we will hear about how inept the Iraqi forces were in achieving victory.

Call it the Basra Narrative.

Insty quotes Ed, and remarks that we should brace ourselves not just for the offensive, but for our own media's "creative" treatment thereof:

The basic rule of press coverage is that if there's fighting, we must be losing. All wars produce ups and downs, bad news and good. It's interesting, though, that our press seems mostly interested in making things look bad, though they're not even very good at reporting the bad news that matters. [ . . . ]

UPDATE: Reader Walter Boxx emails: "The way the Japanese could tell they were losing WWII was that the great victories reported by their media were getting closer and closer to home. Our media problem is like a fun-house mirror version of this - the way we can tell we are winning is that our crushing defeats are happening less often and to different enemies."

I'm really looking forward to this particular "crushing defeat."

Here's a past post from Glenn (which he linked in his post above) about how it isn't just good news that goes unreported by our MSM, but important bad news as well: he points out that bloggers don't have the same access as MSM reporters, and it would be great if the latter were to step up to the plate.

I am not, of course, holding my breath.

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Strategy Page: Al Qaeda Decapitated in Iraq

April 22, 2008: Between mid-March and mid-April, al Qaeda suffered major losses in Iraq. American and Iraqi troops killed or captured 53 al Qaeda leaders. These include men in charge of entire cities (or portions of large cities like Mosul or Baghdad), as well as men in charge of various aspects of terror operations (making bombs, placing them or minding the bombers). Most important, nine of the ten most senior men involved, were captured, and interrogated. This led to locating more al Qaeda staff, and assets. Hundreds of weapons and explosives caches have been discovered this year, as a result of interrogating captured terrorists. The result has been a sharp fall in suicide bomber attacks, and the ones still carried out are against soft targets (civilians), including the recent funeral of two men earlier killed by terrorists. This was part of an al Qaeda campaign to force Sunni Arabs to switch sides again and support terrorism. But these attacks have the opposite effect, causing more hatred for al Qaeda.

It's almost like the Iraqis want to go to the market without the risk of getting blown up by an IED; what an odd little nation.

VodkaPundit wants to know why it is that "only blogs report these stories," but concedes in his own headline that it's a "dumb question."

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I'd say that the "man" is coaching from, as they say, some pretty safe sidelines*:

"I know he's sitting in Iran," Rice said dismissively, when asked about al-Sadr's latest threat to lift a self-imposed cease-fire with government and U.S. forces. "I guess it's all-out war for anybody but him," Rice said. "I guess that's the message; his followers can go to their deaths and he's in Iran."

A full-blown uprising by al-Sadr, who led two rebellions against U.S.-led forces in 2004, could lead to a dramatic increase in violence in Iraq at a time when the Sunni extremist group Al Qaeda in Iraq appears poised for new attacks after suffering severe blows last year.

In a warning posted Saturday on his Web site, al-Sadr said he had tried to defuse tensions by declaring the truce last August, only to see the Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki respond by closing his offices and "resorting to assassinations."

He accused the government of selling out to the Americans and branding his followers as criminals.

"So I am giving my final warning ... to the Iraqi government ... to take the path of peace and abandon violence against its people," al-Sadr said. "If the government does not refrain ... we will declare an open war until liberation."

Rice praised al-Maliki for confronting al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, which had a choke hold on Basra, Iraq's second-largest city. The assault was al-Maliki's most decisive act by far against al-Sadr, a fellow Shiite and once a political patron. Kurdish and Sunni politicians, including a chief rival, have since rallied to al-Maliki, and the Bush administration argues he could emerge stronger from what had appeared to be a military blunder.

h/t: Memeorandum.

* Actually, that phrase is from a piece of fiction, but I simply cannot remember what it is right now. As usual, I suspect J.D. Salinger. Maybe not. It's something I've read a number of times, but that doesn't help me too much.

The source is a piece of dialogue, and it's definitely a male speaker. I'm pretty sure the writer is also male.

I'll probably wake up at 4:00 a.m. and shout the answer into the air, much as one of my mathematician friends yelled "It's Funny Face!" in the middle of the night on a cabin trip once. (There had been some discussion of the Kool-Aid competitor whose flavor names were all kind of cutesy: Choo Choo Cherry, Freckle Face Strawberry, Goofy Grape, Jolly Olly Orange, Loud Mouth Lime, and the like. I was not in on that discussion, by the way: I was in the cool cabin, down the hill. The "pimento" cabin. The cabin in which we ate very well, drank wine, shot pool, watched porn, and raided the other cabin's food supplies on occasion [not because we needed to, but just to demonstrate that we could. What do you want?—our median age was 17 or something like that. We were the smartest people in the world, and we were all going to live forever. Now we're in our forties. We're still the smartest people in the world, and we're still going to live forever, but it hasn't been quite as easy as we once presumed. This is our—well, my—interpretation of maturity.])

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. . . isn't any such thing. But don't tell the headline writers, and ruin their fun.

Karl at Protein Wisdom:

Leftosphere Recycles Distorted Antiwar Propaganda from McClatchy [Karl]

A McClatchy story about a study of the Iraq conflict by former senior Pentagon official Joseph Collins is blasted by Collins at the Small Wars Journal blog:

The Miami Herald story (”Pentagon Study: War is a ‘Debacle’ “) distorts the nature of and intent of my personal research project. It was not an NDU study, nor was it a Pentagon study. Indeed, the implication of the Herald story was that this study was mostly about current events. Such is not the case. It was mainly about the period 2002-04. The story also hypes a number of paragraphs, many of which are quoted out of context. The study does not “lay much of the blame” on Secretary Rumsfeld for problems in the conduct of the war, nor does it say that he “bypassed the Joint Chiefs of Staff.” It does not single out “Condoleeza Rice and Stephen Hadley” for criticism . . .

Of course, the usual suspects in the Leftosphere ran with the distorted McClatchy story.

Sure they did: they saw the distortions somewhere in black and white, which means that they had to represent The Truth!—even if the author of the study himself says he's being misrepresented by the mainstream media.

People are so ill-served by those who call themselves "reporters." It's maddening. That is, I'm angry. But I am not surprised.

h/t: Memeorandum.

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Ed Morrissey, in a piece headined "Iraqis Aren't Stupid—And They're Watching Us":

We can argue over 2002-3 all we want, but it doesn’t have anything to do with 2008. We are in Iraq, and al-Qaeda is arrayed against our troops. In fact, this is the best possible situation if we want to fight terrorists — to have them on a battlefield in straight-up fights against our military. It’s exactly what terrorists don’t want. If they wanted to fight our military, they wouldn’t use bomb commuter trains and fly civilian airplanes into their targets.

We have plenty of politicians who still don’t understand the strategic advantage this gives us. Instead of forcing them to defend ground and fight against the best military machine in history, these politicians want the military to retreat and allow them safe haven in Iraq. The best commitment they’re willing to offer is that if they get too comfortable in their new digs, we’ll stage another invasion of Iraq — without considering the costs involved, both logistically and in human lives, and that it depends on finding another country willing to host us after twice leaving the Iraqis twisting in the wind.

It also presupposes that we’ll get welcomed back for a third round of destruction by the people we would have abandoned twice. If we betray them a second time, don’t expect a third welcome. They already mistrust our honor after the 1991 bug-out that left them in the hands of Saddam Hussein. And it won’t just be the Iraqis who watch whether we keep our word; the Afghanis, the Saudis, the Jordanians all will take note of another retreat — and they will make their deals with radical Islamist terrorists accordingly.

Via Insty.

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Give peace a chance.

Such as it is, of course.

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that we were actually at war with our good friends the Germans in the mid-20th Century. Anyone know for sure?

But if that were the case, we couldn't be allies with them now. Very confusing.

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At least, I don't think Hitch is. But I still adore his writing, and I'm not sorry, and I have no intention of stopping.

Via the puppyblender who brung me (today), an observation on the anniversary of the war, a series Slate entitled "How Did We Get Iraq Wrong?" (But not, of course, in an editorial way. No, no.)

Hitchens' short answer: I didn't.

I would . . . maintain that . . . incompetence doesn't condemn the enterprise wholesale. A much-wanted war criminal was put on public trial. The Kurdish and Shiite majority was rescued from the ever-present threat of a renewed genocide. A huge, hideous military and party apparatus, directed at internal repression and external aggression was (perhaps overhastily) dismantled. The largest wetlands in the region, habitat of the historic Marsh Arabs, have been largely recuperated. Huge fresh oilfields have been found, including in formerly oil free Sunni provinces, and some important initial investment in them made. Elections have been held, and the outline of a federal system has been proposed as the only alternative to a) a sectarian despotism and b) a sectarian partition and fragmentation. Not unimportantly, a battlefield defeat has been inflicted on al-Qaida and its surrogates, who (not without some Baathist collaboration) had hoped to constitute the successor regime in a failed state and an imploded society. Further afield, a perfectly defensible case can be made that the Syrian Baathists would not have evacuated Lebanon, nor would the Qaddafi gang have turned over Libya's (much higher than anticipated) stock of WMD if not for the ripple effect of the removal of the region's keystone dictatorship.

Read the whole thing. It's loaded to the gills with nuance.

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. . . that could.

UPDATE: Now new and improved, with a functional link!

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We learn from our mistakes.

Also, we have better legs. No—it's true.

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. . . on Christopher Dickey's Newsweek article, which conflates the movie Deliverance with real life:

If Cheney is Burt Reynolds, and the rest of America is Jon Voight, and the river is Iraq, who are the hillbillies? Well, presumably (for he doesn't spell it out) they're the dark forces you make yourself vulnerable to when you blunder into somewhere you shouldn't be. When the quartet returns to Atlanta a man short, they may understand how thin the veneer of civilization is, but they don't have to worry that their suburban cul-de-sacs will be overrun and reduced to the same state of nature as the backwoods.

That's the flaw in the thesis: Robert D. Kaplan, a shrewd observer of global affairs, has referred to the jihadist redoubts and other lawless fringes of the map as "Indian territory." It's a cute joke but a misleading one. The difference between the old Indian territory and the new is this: No one had to worry about the Sioux riding down Fifth Avenue, just as Burt Reynolds never had to worry about the mountain man breaking into his rec room. But Iran has put bounties on London novelists, assassinated dissidents in Paris, blown up community centers in Buenos Aires, seeded proxy terror groups in Lebanon and Palestine, radicalized Muslim populations throughout Central Asia – and it's now going nuclear. The leaders of North Korea, Sudan and Syria are not stump-toothed Appalachian losers: Their emissaries wear suits and dine in Manhattan restaurants every night.

That is the essence of it, right there. And it is something most of my friends don't understand: to them, Hitler was a threat to Europe, but the jihadists are a threat to nobody in particular (minus a few thousand people in New York's financial district who are already dead—but wouldn't be if the West would just learn to act nice).

Denial, as they say, isn't just a river.

ht: Stud/God Insty.

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is give war a chance.

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That is, the war between the MSM and the current administration—which the administration is losing, despite the fact that it's prevailing in the larger War on Terror (including the War in Iraq).

If one simply takes the administration at its word about our intentions and long-term goals in this war, then in fact, we're doing quite well in Iraq. It only looks bad because the Left swore we were going to veer hard-right, but we went straight instead. The passengers thought we'd lost control of the vehicle, when in fact that was the intended route all along.

Maddening, I know.

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Iraq is just exactly like Vietnam. Just exactly.

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On the current Democratic Party train wreck:

Reid: Bush [is] in denial. This from a member of the Democratic leadership that is pushing a symbolic retreat plan he knows wonÂ’t survive a veto, simply to make the petulant point.

More on what he calls "the non-plan that is going nowhere":

Troop withdrawal begins Oct. 1, with the bulk of the troops out by April 1. It sets strict standards for resting, training and equipping troops, though itÂ’s not clear why Democrats want to waste money on that, if they donÂ’t plan to use them. It also sets benchmarks for the Iraqi government to reach on dealing with militias, re-Baathify, share oil revenues, etc. Not clear what incentive the Iraqi government has to meet any benchmarks, because all that is going out the window with the current government once open season starts, and any Iraqi official with half a brain is going to be actively working on an individual survival plan.

Meanwhile, my mother continues to insist that we should have "finished Afghanistan," before "starting in Iraq." Just like we finished Germany, before starting in Japan. Oh, wait . . .

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. . . have been reading their Dale Carnegie.

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Insty has a mini-roundup on the incident in which CNN "reporter" Michael Ware actually heckled John McCain during a press conference.

See also Ace's take on Michael Ware. He's right. This guy isn't a reporter. But how much longer is CNN going to continue to pay him to party hard and slant the news?

After one of Glenn's readers points out that a "dogma" is developing in the MSM (the "Standard Total Journalistic View of Iraq"), he responds, "Hmm. There's a developing standard view on journalists and the war, too."

Yup.

UPDATE: Okay: this is turning into another one of those annoying situations in which each side has its own "facts." If Drudge made this up, I'm going to be pretty pissed. See here. Does anyone know if this video is accurate/edited?

Anyone? Fucking Bueller?

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1 Your old man???

Posted by: yazoota at April 02, 2007 06:56 AM (xUyci)

2 Ouch! Thanks. Does this mean I have to stop getting mad at people who pronounce my last name "McCain"? I hope not.

Posted by: Attila Girl at April 02, 2007 08:20 AM (1tv3E)

3 All that time you spend on The Dark Side is making you paranoid, that's all.

Posted by: yazoota at April 02, 2007 08:43 AM (xUyci)

4

Posted by: Attila Girl at April 02, 2007 07:39 PM (1tv3E)

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. . . remembers the assault, four years ago today in Iraq.

And stud/god Michael Kelly has a cameo!

It's an intense read—very engrossing.

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Hackbarth suggests that the upcoming showdown between the President and Congress over funding the troops in Iraq might turn into a game of chicken. I hope it doesn't. Of course, the "signing statement" option is worse, as I see it: for Bush to sign something with an exit date on it at all can't help but cheer the insurgents on.

Just as Congress needs to show some backbone and either fund our presence there or not fund it, Bush has to show some backbone and veto anything that contains an exit date or excessive pork.

And the April 16th idea is absurd, tantamount to saying "we support the troops, but not their mission. Nor their operations. Nor their overhead just for being there."

Listen, guys and gals: you took Congress over by promising to be more accountable and less corrupt. You didn't deliver on that: instead, you're trying to turn your victory into a mandate on ending the war. If you believe that—really, really believe it—you know what you need to do.

Cut funding completely.

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