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."

Posted by: Attila Girl at 12:07 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 238 words, total size 2 kb.

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.])

Posted by: Attila Girl at 11:01 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
Post contains 479 words, total size 3 kb.

. . . 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.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 09:33 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 261 words, total size 2 kb.

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.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 11:22 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
Post contains 294 words, total size 2 kb.

Give peace a chance.

Such as it is, of course.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 10:32 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 22 words, total size 1 kb.