Booby-Trapped Highways in Iraq

Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) have been the main cause of death for coalition troops in Iraq. Multiple patrol and supply convoys are always traveling from place to place in Iraq, and no road can be assumed safe. What are the counter-measures?

...Up to 80 percent of US casualties during the past two years of the conflict had been caused by IED attacks. In 2006, some road patrol units in Anbar province were discovering or setting off up to 10 IEDs each night patrol while covering less than a mile of roadway...

[But] Investment in "alien-looking" mine-detection equipment by the U.S. military, combined with increased funding for Iraqi police and army units, has cut the number of improvised explosive attacks in the past year in the northern part of the country from 6,000 a month a year ago to less than 500 this month.

Fully 75 percent of IEDs (improvised explosive devices) emplaced in parts of Iraq are now being discovered before they explode, the US Army said.

...To combat the explosive tire, engineer battalions now use several pieces of newly developed equipment that have little use outside of bomb discovery. The first looks like a mating of an industrial road-grader and a pawn-shop robotic arm.

Called a 'Husky', the South African-made mine detector allows its single operator to control a 20-foot-long robotic arm with a camera and two-pronged claw at the end to find out what is inside an abandoned tire, all at a safe distance. The occupant of the Husky sits 12 feet above the ground in a blast-proof cab.

In this case, the tire was holding an anti-tank mine, probably Italian or Chinese-made, containing enough explosives to seriously damage a vehicle if it ran directly over it.

To destroy the tire bomb, the Army has come to depend on an even more outlandish, but highly effective piece of equipment – the Talon – a robotic remote-controlled tread vehicle with an on-board video camera to verify and then destroy the IED without putting humans in harm's way. The Talon can then use a small robotic arm to carry counter-charges, in this case, two sticks of C-4 explosive with a time-fuse. _LWJ

Militaries are typically unwieldy bureaucracies (like all government bureaucracies) that are slow to adjust to changing threats. When a threat becomes as large and enduring as IEDs became in Iraq, however, even the military had to respond. Whether the new anti-IED technologies are more responsible for safer roads than the improved living conditions in Iraq, can be debated. Both are important.

The threat of IEDs along roadsides is merely an extension of the roadside ambush that can be traced all the way back to the stalking of watering holes by predators, waiting for prey to come and drink. Primitive humans placed snares along known pathways and flightways of unwary birds and small mammals.

Every road on Earth is subject to IEDs and mines. Iraq is a world battlefield, where tactics from the world jihad are being pitted against counter tactics from civilised countries. Civilised countries do not always win such confrontations. Such running battles depend upon the willingness to strike while the iron is hot. Any civilisation that is too slow or reluctant to confront a ruthless enemy puts itself in needless danger.

Muqtada al-Sadr: A Source of Family Shame

A relative of renegade Muqtada al-Sadr has indicated that the Sadar family of Iraq is planning to deal with the renegade rebel son as an internal family matter.

Alseyed Josef Alsadar a member of the honored Sadar family wrote a letter to Alrafedain news (Nida'a al Rafidain News) which said: "Muqtada al-Sadr has tainted the reputation of this respected family, and the family disowns Muqtada. We are as innocent of him as the wolf is of the blood of Josef (Biblical (Old Testament I believe) and Koranic reference). The family is working on ways to discipline him with in the family. Consultations for this are held at the highest level to come up with punishments for its rogue son.
_GatewayPundit

This statement from a senior member of the Sadar family comes as the rebel cleric al-Sadr threatens to unleash new violence upon Iraq in the coming days and weeks.

Sadr threatened to end the cease-fire after Iraqi troops took over the Mahdi Army-dominated neighborhood of Hayaniyah in Basrah and ejected the Sadrist political party from government-owned offices in the city. He openly said he was prepared to revolt against the government.

"Do you want a third uprising?” Sadr said, referring to the two Mahdi Army uprisings in Baghdad, Najaf, and the South in April and August 2006. "So I direct my last warning and speech to the Iraqi government to refrain and to take the path of peace and abandon violence against its people. If the government does not refrain and leash the militias that have penetrated it, we will announce an open war until liberation." __LongWarJournal

The rabble following of Sadr has stockpiled weapons for the threatened uprising across the Shia regions of Iraq, although one huge stockpile has been uncovered in Karbalah.

Security forces on Monday seized a huge weapons cache in western Karbala, the police chief said.... “A large security force accompanied by explosive ordinance disposal team moved to al-Tar, a highland area containing a number of caves, to search for explosive based on intelligence tips,” Brig. Gen. Raid Shakir, Karbala security operations commander, told Aswat al-Iraq - Voices of Iraq - (VOI).
The security official pointed out “forces found 20 mortar of different calibers, 72 rocket-propelled grenade(RPG), 54 roadside bombs, ammunition boxes, wires, 23 kg TNT, 33 hand grenades, 14 explosive controls, blast wires, and more than 1000 rifles along with their bullets.”.....Al-Tar is an archaeological site whose history dates back five thousand years characterized by highland caves. ...“The armed groups hid the weapons in such a remote fearful area to prepare for armed actions in the city,” the official added...Karbala, the second holiest Shiite city after Najaf and the capital city of Karbala province, lies 110 south-west of Baghdad. _Source

As more Iraqis grow weary of constant warfare and terrorist atrocities, the number of citizen reports to authorities of arms caches and gathering places for terrorists--both Shia and Sunni--are increasing.

MIT / Johns Hopkins / Lancet Corruption Scandal Update: George Soros Moneybags

The most recent news concerning the corruption scandal involving Johns Hopkins University and The Lancet, a UK medical journal, leads us directly to George Soros.

Soros, 77, provided almost half the £50,000 cost of the research, which appeared in The Lancet, the medical journal. Its claim was 10 times higher than consensus estimates of the number of war dead.

The study, published in 2006, was hailed by antiwar campaigners as evidence of the scale of the disaster caused by the invasion, but Downing Street and President George Bush challenged its methodology.

New research published by The New England Journal of Medicine estimates that 151,000 people - less than a quarter of The Lancet estimate - have died since the invasion in 2003.

“The authors should have disclosed the [Soros] donation and for many people that would have been a disqualifying factor in terms of publishing the research,” said Michael Spagat, economics professor at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Timesonline

So this is how much MIT, Johns Hopkins, and The Lancet can be bought for--to influence a US election? Pathetic.

Can George Soros buy your vote? No, a better way to put it: could George Soros have already bought your vote--and you did not even know it?

Politics and the Corruption of a Formerly Prestigious Medical Journal

As a trained epidemiologist, I regret being forced by the Lancet to reveal the underlying sleaziness of a sub-layer of the epidemiologic profession, as well as medical journalism. When the Lancet published its reports on Iraqi civilian casualties[pdf]--immediately before the US 2006 mid-term elections--it was clear to me that the authors had taken some unwarranted shortcuts in methodology. What was even clearer, was that the Lancet editorial staff was willing to overlook the methodologic deficiencies of the report, and publish anyway--just in time to influence the US elections. Since then, I have had no respect for the Lancet.

How to explain the enormous discrepancy between The Lancet's estimation of Iraqi war deaths and those from studies that used other methodologies? For starters, the authors of the Lancet study followed a model that ensured that even minor components of the data, when extrapolated over the whole population, would yield huge differences in the death toll. Skeptical commentators have highlighted questionable assumptions, implausible data, and ideological leanings among the authors, Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, and Les Roberts.

...Lafta had been a child-health official in Saddam Hussein's ministry of health when the ministry was trying to end the international sanctions against Iraq by asserting that many Iraqis were dying from hunger, disease, or cancer caused by spent U.S. depleted-uranium shells remaining from the 1991 Persian Gulf War. In 2000, Lafta authored at least two brief articles contending that U.N. sanctions had caused many deaths by starvation among Iraqi children.

...Little is known about Lafta's decision-making in amassing the data for the Lancet surveys....Even though the second study was even further out of line with other sources' estimates than the first, it got tremendous attention -- probably because its findings fit an emerging narrative: Iraq was a horrific mess....Democrats who had opposed Bush's Iraq campaign embraced the report. Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., for example, issued a statement saying that the "new study is a chilling and somber reminder of the unacceptably high human cost of this war.... We must not stay on the same failed course any longer." Such remarks, amplified by myriad articles, broadcasts, and blogs, helped to cement Americans' increasingly negative perceptions of the war. "For those who wanted to believe it, it gave them a new number to circulate, [and] it was a defining moment" in attitudes toward the war, said pollster John Zogby, who commended the report in a CNN interview.

...In the Middle East, both Sunni and Shiite Islamist groups have used the study to bolster their claims that the West is waging a war against Islam. In an October 30, 2007, debate on Al Jazeera, for example, an Egyptian cleric, Sheik Ibrahim al-Khouli, slammed a Syrian author's criticism of fundamentalist Islam. The United States and Europe had "fought in Iraq and destroyed it," he said. They "killed one and a half million people ... [and] killed a million Iraqi children during the [1990s sanctions] siege; left traces of enriched uranium from the weapons that were used [in 1991]; and destroyed the environment for the next 35 billion years, according to American estimates."

...the authors have declined to provide the surveyors' reports and forms that might bolster confidence in their findings. Customary scientific practice holds that an experiment must be transparent -- and repeatable -- to win credence. Submitting to that scientific method, the authors would make the unvarnished data available for inspection by other researchers. Because they did not do this, citing concerns about the security of the questioners and respondents, critics have raised the most basic question about this research: Was it verifiably undertaken as described in the two Lancet articles?

"The authors refuse to provide anyone with the underlying data," said David Kane, a statistician and a fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Statistics at Harvard University. Some critics have wondered whether the Iraqi researchers engaged in a practice known as "curb-stoning," sitting on a curb and filling out the forms to reach a desired result. Another possibility is that the teams went primarily into neighborhoods controlled by anti-American militias and were steered to homes that would provide information about the "crimes" committed by the Americans.

National Journal

This Lance/Johns Hopkins article has become a cluster fuck--damning politically interested medical journalism, the Lancet, epidemiology, Johns Hopkins, and specifically damning the authors of the study.

It seems likely that Lafta--a former Saddam Hussein official--has been faking his research ever since the first Gulf War in 1991. Lafta's co-authors allowed their political leanings to influence their judgment. The Lancet's editors allowed their anti-Americanism to bring them to the precipice of journalistic integrity--and they stepped over the brink.

It is a sad story of corruption, sleaze, failed ethics, and lost journalistic integrity and reputation. It will be instructive to see how the mainstream media covers the aftermath of a journalistic catastrophe that they themselves elevated to monumental proportions when they believed the story to be true.

Iraq and the 2008 US Election

It was just this past spring that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was proclaiming:

"We're going to pick up Senate seats as a result of this war," Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) told reporters yesterday. "Senator Schumer has shown me numbers that are compelling and astounding."

The Democrats clearly understood that the worse the situation in Iraq became, the better their electoral prospects.

It was just this past summer that House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn worried that a positive report on the surge in September by General David Petraeus would be “a big problem for us”.

The Democrats clearly understood that the better the situation in Iraq became, the worse their electoral prospects.

It was just this month that House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey was speculating that violence was down in Iraq because the terrorists "are running out of people to kill,” and because “[t]here are fewer targets of opportunity.”

The Democrats clearly understand that the better the American people understand that the situation in Iraq is improving, the worse their electoral prospects.

American Thinker

What is Speaker Pelosi saying about Iraq these days?

Nancy Pelosi stoutly maintains her state of denial, saying this about the war just two weeks ago: "This is not working. . . . We must reverse it." A euphemism for "abandon the field," which is what every Democratic presidential candidate is promising, with variations only in how precipitous to make the retreat.

Washington Post

It seems as if US Democratic Party leaders are hoping for a US disaster in Iraq so as to get more of their candidates elected in 2008.

Violence is down. Iraqis are returning. The American people are beginning to see this progress, despite the efforts of Democrats and many in the media to hide it from them.

For now, the number of Iraqis returning may seem small compared to an estimated 2 million that have fled. But the number is growing faster than anyone has anticipated. And those returning are not returning as targets of opportunity for terrorists, but as participants in the opportunity for freedom.

To the extent that the war in Iraq will play a significant role in the 2008 elections, the numbers should be compelling and astounding to Democrats, in a direction they never could have imagined just a few months ago.

American Thinker

No one knows what will happen between now and November 2008. The world may be destroyed by an errant asteroid or gamma ray pulse. But when the media or a political party studiously ignores a phenomenon that is obvious to everyone else, they lose credibility that took decades to build.

Bin Laden Singing Iraqi Blues

Bin Laden's glorious revolution has not been doing very well lately.

On October 22nd, Osama bin Laden admitted that al Qaeda had lost its war in Iraq. In an audiotape speech titled "Message to the people of Iraq," bin Laden complains of disunity and poor use of resources. He admits that al Qaeda made mistakes, and that all Sunni Arabs must unite to defeat the foreigners and Shia Moslems. What bin Laden is most upset about is the large number of Sunni Arab terrorists who have switched sides in Iraq. This has actually been going on for a while. Tribal leaders and warlords in the west (Anbar province) have been turning on terrorist groups, especially al Qaeda, for several years.

...Many of the Iraqi Sunni Arab terrorists are religious, but not religious enough for the al Qaeda hard core. And it's the hard liners that usually set the agenda. That's a fatal flaw with groups that depend on terrorism to keep the fight going. Cracking down on the hard core requires more clout and muscle than al Qaeda possesses these days. And that's another unspoken reason by bin Laden is singing the blues.

Source

Around the world, the news is bad for the pale and ghostly leader of the violent terror movement al qaeda. While Europe's mosques and the mosques of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are generating plenty of "youth bulge" fanatics willing to blow themselves up for God and Virgins, the logistical infrastructure for the movement has been eroded by constant attack from US coalition and allied intelligence and security services.

The leftists who control the US Democratic Party and anti-American interests internationally, do not like to see bin Laden so unhappy. Defeat for America in Iraq would be equally good for Al Qaeda as for the leftists. Perhaps that is why you see North American and international journalists painting desperate pictures of defeat in Iraq despite the real progress made by Petraeus and the Iraqi security forces.

Christopher Hitchens Forced to Face a Harsh Reality of War

In this Vanity Fair Column, Christopher Hitchens tells the story of 2nd Lt. Mark Daily, who was killed in Iraq by an IED 15 Jan. 2007. Hitchens was badly shaken by this particular death, because he may have been partially responsible for it.

In a way, the story was almost too perfect: this handsome lad had been born on the Fourth of July, was a registered Democrat and self-described agnostic, a U.C.L.A. honors graduate, and during his college days had fairly decided reservations about the war in Iraq. I read on, and actually printed the story out, and was turning a page when I saw the following:

"Somewhere along the way, he changed his mind. His family says there was no epiphany. Writings by author and columnist Christopher Hitchens on the moral case for war deeply influenced him … "

I don't exaggerate by much when I say that I froze. I certainly felt a very deep pang of cold dismay. I had just returned from a visit to Iraq with my own son (who is 23, as was young Mr. Daily) and had found myself in a deeply pessimistic frame of mind about the war. Was it possible that I had helped persuade someone I had never met to place himself in the path of an I.E.D.? Over-dramatizing myself a bit in the angst of the moment, I found I was thinking of William Butler Yeats, who was chilled to discover that the Irish rebels of 1916 had gone to their deaths quoting his play Cathleen ni Houlihan. He tried to cope with the disturbing idea in his poem "Man and the Echo":

Did that play of mine send out
Certain men the English shot? …
Could my spoken words have checked
That whereby a house lay wrecked?

...as I wrote to his parents, I was quite prepared for them to resent me. So let me introduce you to one of the most generous and decent families in the United States, and allow me to tell you something of their experience.

In the midst of their own grief, to begin with, they took the trouble to try to make me feel better. I wasn't to worry about any "guilt or responsibility": their son had signed up with his eyes wide open and had "assured us that if he knew the possible outcome might be this, he would still go rather than have the option of living to age 50 and never having served his country. Trust us when we tell you that he was quite convincing and persuasive on this point, so that by the end of the conversation we were practically packing his bags and waving him off." This made me relax fractionally, but then they went on to write: "Prior to his deployment he told us he was going to try to contact you from Iraq. He had the idea of being a correspondent from the front-lines through you, and wanted to get your opinion about his journalistic potential. He told us that he had tried to contact you from either Kuwait or Iraq. He thought maybe his e-mail had not reached you … " That was a gash in my hide all right: I think of all the junk e-mail I read every day, and then reflect that his precious one never got to me.

...I have now talked to a good number of those who knew Mark Daily or were related to him, and it's clear that the country lost an exceptional young citizen, whom I shall always wish I had had the chance to meet. He seems to have passed every test of young manhood, and to have been admired and loved and respected by old and young, male and female, family and friends. He could have had any career path he liked (and won a George C. Marshall Award that led to an offer to teach at West Point). Why are we robbed of his contribution?

Vanity Fair

Go to the article and read the whole thing. Mark Daily was a man who should be known for who he was, in his own words. To Hitchens' credit, he limits his personal wallowing in guilt, and allows 2nd Lt. Daily to speak for himself.

Anyone who has followed the milblogs understands that as special as Lt. Daily was, he was not terribly out of the mainstream of the young men who have died in Iraq. The US military is currently meeting its enlistment quotas in all its service branches. The men and women going to Iraq and Afghanistan to fight could make more money elsewhere, almost all of them with significantly less risk. They, like Lt. Daily have consciously chosen to risk their lives by enlisting during wartime, because in overwhelming numbers they believe in the mission of the US led coalition.

Hitchens, for all his self-absorption, did not invent the ideas he published concerning the dangers of islamo-fascism. His writings are of high quality, but perhaps not the highest, and certainly he is far from alone in raising the alarm against allowing jihadis free run of the middle east and Asia.

Death is an inevitable consequence of war, and some particular deaths may touch us personally in ways almost too harsh to abide. If a war is worth fighting, it is worth fighting even if very bright and worthy men and women may die.

In this case, of course, the war in question is not Iraq. The war in question is the greater war against the religious jihadi movement for a world-wide caliphate. Iraq is merely a battle within the war. The war itself is being carried out in London, Paris, Madrid, rural Virginia, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Nigeria--on every continent and in virtually every nation.

Mr. Hitchens, if you are too weak to see this larger war through, this long, long war--you may certainly bow out any time you like. The Mark Daily's go to fight because they believe it is the right thing to do. They will continue to go to fight--and some will come home in flag-draped coffins--even if you choose to put your particular burden down.

Life contains many trials by fire. Some face them very early in life. Some are allowed to wait until middle age or later.

Iraq's Struggle: Who You Gonna Believe? The Media or Your Lyin' Eyes?

The list of those who have invested deeply in a US defeat in Iraq (actually a defeat for the Iraqi people) is long, and includes most western media, most leftist politicians, most leftist bloggers, and most academics in the social sciences. Iraq indeed has relatively few westerners who believe in its future. How long would that take to change?

The major problem in Iraq is back in the United States. There, many politicians either don't bother, or don't want to believe, what is actually happening, and has happened, in Iraq. In a way, that makes sense. Because what is going on in Iraq is so totally alien to the experience of American politicians. Moreover, many Americans take a purely partisan, party line, attitude towards Iraq. So logic and fact has nothing to do with their assessments of the situation.

...When Saddam was deposed in 2003, most (well, many) Sunni Arabs believed they would only be out of power temporarily. This sort of thing you can pick up on the Internet (OK, mostly on Arab language message boards, but it's out there). Saddam's followers (the Baath Party) and al Qaeda believed a few years of terror would subdue the Shia, scare away the Americans, and the Sunni Arabs would return to their natural state as the rulers of Iraq. U.S. troops quickly picked up on this Sunni mindset. Because Sunni Arabs were the best educated group, most of the local translators the troops used were Sunni Arabs, and even these guys took it for granted that, eventually, the Sunni Arabs would have to be in charge if the country were to function. The Sunni Arabs believed the Shia were a bunch of ignorant, excitable, inept (and so on) scum who could never run a government. Four years later, the Shia have sort-of proved the Sunni Arabs wrong. Now many Sunni Arabs want to make peace, not suicide bombs.

Which brings up another major issue in Iraq. Many Iraqis believe only a dictator can run the country, and force all the factions to behave. However, a majority of Iraqis recognize that dictatorships tend to be poor and repressive, while democracies are prosperous and pleasant. The problem is that the traditions of tribalism and corruption (everything, and everyone, has their price) do not mesh well with democracy. This doesn't mean democracy can't work under these conditions, many do. It does mean that it takes more effort, and the results are not neat and clean, as Americans expect their democracies to be.

The basic problem is that the United States is divided into two groups; those who have worked (or fought) in Iraq, or otherwise paid close attention to what's happening on the ground, and those who create their own picture of what's happening, one that fits other needs (personal, political, religious). No amount of wishing will change what is going on over there. The majority of the population hates the Sunni Arabs, who now have four years of terrorist attacks added to their list of sins. The Kurds, although beset by corruption and factionalism, have shown that you can still have peace, security and prosperity if everyone works together. The Arabs to the south see that, but have not been able to work together well enough to make it happen. Will the Arabs be able to overcome their factionalism and hatreds? THAT is the big question. What is lost in all the rhetoric about Iraq is that Iraq is the only real Arab democracy in the Middle East. Egypt is a one party state, a dictatorship masquerading as a dictatorship. Every other Arab state is either a dictatorship or a monarchy.

Iraqis know they are in a position to show the way, to an era of better government, and the freedoms and prosperity that flows from that. Iraqis know they have problems with religion, tribalism and corruption. Iraqis know what they are up against. Do you?

Strategy Page

Once a blogger, a journalist, a politician, an academic, an intellectual invests so deeply in defeat that he cannot possibly extricate himself without serious explanation, such a person--unless scrupulously honest--will feel forced to present defeat as the reality, well beyond the point when a reasonable person begins to have doubts. Since a widespread belief in defeat often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, such persons may feel that their best course is to bluff the situation to the end. They feel, if they are lucky, that defeat will surely happen, if they can convince everyone of its inevitability.

This pretense of theirs, which seems the most important thing in the world to maintain, is actually quite a small thing in reality. But will they ever understand?

To them, it is important that a particular politician, or a particular political party, or a particular ideological grouping, or a particular nation, lose. But it is the people who want a better life who will lose, thanks in no small way to these small time investors, who invested so deeply in the defeat of those they hated, which was actually the defeat of the hopes of many millions for a better life.

Michael Totten in Mashudah

Michael Totten has a new dispatch, this time from Mashudah. It is worth reading in full, like all of Totten's Iraq dispatches. Here are a few short excerpts:

He introduced me to the man in charge of the station, Captain J. Dow Covey from New York City.

“Do you know the Weekly Standard magazine?” Captain Covey asked me.

“Of course,” I said.

“My buddy Tom Cotton was just written up there,” he said. “It was pretty cool seeing him in that magazine.”

“What did he do to get in the magazine?” I said.

“He’s like me,” he said. “He’s a Harvard Law grad who joined the Army after 9/11. I’m an attorney.”

“You’re an attorney?” I said. “What are you doing out here in Iraq?”

“I practiced law for three years,” he said, “then got into investment banking. When 9/11 happened I just had to sign up with the Army. Investment banking is a lot more stressful than this.”

“You’re kidding, right?” I said.

“No,” he said and laughed. “I am totally serious.”

[ed: WTF???]

Pride is much more important in Arab culture than it is in the West. Humiliation is therefore more painful. I wondered if this created problems when Americans train Iraqi soldiers and police officers. What must it feel like for local men to be yelled at by foreigners who showed up uninvited and knew their job better than they did?

Colonel Steele insists it isn’t a problem.

“They don’t want to be babied,” he said. “They want to be treated as equals and adults. Their shame culture actually helps. Our new recruits recently complained about having sore feet during a march. When they noticed our female soldiers are in better shape than they are, they never complained again. Also, when we first had them try on our body armor, it nearly broke their spines. They want to be physically capable of wearing it, too.”

[ed: this fear of being made to look bad by American females seems to be a powerful motivator for arabs. What is it about their culture that makes arab males naturally lazy and weak?]

“I am optimistic,” he said. “But only for one single reason. Because I talk to the average Joe in Iraq. I meet the children and parents. Iraqi parents love their children as much as I love mine.”

I knew what he meant. Counterintuitive and contradictory as it may seem, I never felt more optimistic in Iraq than I did when I walked the streets and interacted with average Iraqis. Iraq looks more doomed from inside the base than it does outside on the street, and it looks more doomed from across the Atlantic than it does from inside the base.

Major Mike Garcia said this view of Iraq is typical. “Soldiers who don’t leave the FOB [Forward Operating Base] are more likely to be pessimistic than those who go out on patrol. They’re less aware of what’s actually happening and have fewer reality checks on their gloom.”

...We drove back down IED Alley to Camp Taji. It was 4:00 in the afternoon, and so unbearably hot. The air conditioner in the Humvee hardly did anything. I desperately wanted a shower so I could wash Iraq off my skin.

Nothing exploded on our way back.

Major Garcia wanted to know what I thought. I didn’t know what to say.

“Whether we like it or not,” he said, “and whether we like them or not, they are the future of this country.”

Source

Totten doesn't try to sugar coat the dismal situation in Iraq. That is good. Neither does he present the situation as completely hopeless, like some defeatist bloggers and politicians.

Dealing with arabs is not easy or predictable. TE Lawrence and many other embedded officers of more modern militaries have learned that lesson the hard way. Many more will have to learn it in the future. Cultures are slow to change, particularly cultures such as arab cultures and other tribal cultures.

Metrics for Iraqi Success

When General Petraeus reports to US President Bush in September on the progress of the nation-building and counter-insurgency mission in Iraq, what metrics will he use? Austin Bay, a writer and former US military intelligence officer, suggests a possible list that the general may use.

This list is a “rough draft” of “rough metrics” but I am certain it includes in some shape or form a few of the “metrics” the September report will consider. Call it a Baker’s Dozen – not to be confused with James Baker and the Iraq Study Group. Some of them obbiously incorporate both qualitative judgments and quantitative measures.

1) Number of trained and equipped Iraqi troops and their level of training

(2) Number of qualified Iraqi senior and mid-level military officers (key measure: can they plan and lead their own ops?)

(3) Number and locale of police precincts judged competent and minimally corrupt (and don’t mention Chicago to me — I know minimally corrupt applies to places in the US — like every Texas border town)

(4) Number of “extremist violence” related incidents (incline, steady, or decline) and location of incidents

(5) An assessment of the “demonstrated commitment” of key sheiks and local leaders in terms of cooperating with security forces and development teams – perhaps analyzed on a neighborhood by neighborhood level.

(6) Control of Iran and Syrian borders (what does this mean? Good question — better surveillance of the borders, more border forts, more reliable border cops, dimunition in flow of supplies for sectarian militias and terrorist groups…etc)

(7) Estimate of “robustness” of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia cells. (If we have killed a lot of these sociopaths, have the sociopaths we’ve killed been replaced?)

(8) Quality of Iraqi government action against Shia death squads (including Mahdi Militia) [NOTE: maybe quality is a hedge word, but you get the point.]

(9) Competence of key ministry officials and senior department heads — Interior and Defense — as well as an estimate of their commitment to a free, federal Iraq, [This leads to an assessment of provincial and national leaders commitment…)

(10) “Infrastructure protection” trend lines — are power lines, pipelines, key installations being protected?

(11) Trend line of development. At the local level: have the revitalized PRTs begun to do their jobs? At the national level: What’s happening to Iraq’s GDP?

(12) A neighborhood by neighborhood evaluation of the “new security plan” — which on the ground was about securing neighborhoods and stopping the “cycle of violence” (ie, Sunni terrorists kick it off, Shia death quads enter, the locals are caught in between…)

(13) An estimate of the quality of intelligence (better, same, worse) provided by Iraqi police, military, and citizens. If the intel from a neighborhood, town, or province has improved, this potentially is an indcator of increasing faith in the government’s capacity to defend vulnerable civilians. (Intel obviously affects several other metrics…few of these metrics are discrete.)

Austin Bay Blog

Michael Totten Reports From Iraq--A Must Read!

Michael Totten and Michael Yon are the two most reliable reporters recently or currently inside Iraq. Totten's latest dispatch is must reading for anyone wanting to dispense with his own prejudices about Iraq, and read Totten's harsh blend of optimism and pessimism that is modern Iraq.

“They act like our friends,” said Master Sergeant Tyler. “It is a façade to an extent, yes. They get benefits from having a good relationship with us and will do and say anything to keep us on their side.”

I heard rumors that the Iraqi Army colonel in charge of his side of War Eagle is himself a supporter of Moqtada al Sadr. I could not, however, confirm that with Military Intelligence. Maybe it’s true and maybe it isn’t. American soldiers there believe it is.

Nothing makes me more pessimistic about Iraq’s future prospects than this. The Mahdi Army is Iran’s major proxy in Iraq. It is, in effect, the Iraqi branch of Hezbollah.

...I went on mounted and dismounted foot patrols with American soldiers every day in that part of Baghdad. Except for one slightly creepy experience where shadowy figures stalked us in the dark, all the local Iraqis I met and interacted with were exceptionally friendly.

On a typical patrol at dawn the soldiers I embedded with did only two things: they kept up a visible presence in the area and tossed boxes of Girl Scout cookies to children.

As the morning progressed and more people woke up, entire families came out of their houses to greet us and wave. Private Goings, the gunner in the Humvee I rode in, threw one box of cookies after another. Kids and their parents received them ecstatically. We did this all morning, for four hours. Aside from a 20 minute dismounted patrol near a palm grove, all we did was drive around and throw cookies.

...“A lot of the people around here are Sadr supporters,” said Sergeant Lizanne. “But they’re also pro-coalition. I don’t really understand how that works.”

Don’t ask me to explain it. Moqtada al Sadr is an enemy of the United States. His militiamen kill or at least try to kill Americans every day elsewhere in Baghdad. How anyone in Iraq could support both him and the Americans is beyond me.

Iraq is a bewildering country. I can tell you what I see and what I hear, but I can’t unravel and explain with confidence the contradictions in the hearts and minds of its people. The Kurds are fairly straightforward and easy to read. The recently turned pro-American Arabs of Anbar Province likewise aren’t too complicated these days. Baghdad, though, is all but impenetrable. I don’t suggest you trust any Westerner who hasn’t spent years there who says he or she understands the alleyways and secrets of that city.

In my mind I keep returning to what an Iraqi interpreter named Hammer said to me a few days before. “You can’t understand Iraq because you can’t get inside their mind. When you get inside their mind…it is a crazy mind.”

“Do you think the civilians here are genuinely friendly or just faking it?” I asked Sergeant Lizanne. Private Goings tossed more boxes of cookies.

“Hmm,” he said. “Well, I wouldn’t want to be out here by myself at night, I’ll tell you that much. The children really do love us, though. At least we’re making friends with the next generation.”

Source

I am not willing to excerpt more than this. One really must read the entire report to understand what Totten is trying to say.

Iraq will never be an American style democracy--duhhhh! Who ever believed it would? No one that I know. Regardless, check out the link to Totten's article.

Hey Nancy!...The US Military Is More Successful Than The World Wants to Believe--Don't Tell Harry

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.

Source

When you are so deeply invested in a US defeat in Iraq as Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, Barak Obama, the European news media, the BBC, many bloggers . . . you simply cannot let this information sneak past the internal censors. Too much cognitive dissonance.

This is not the story of a war that is won. But neither is it the story of a war that is lost. The problem is much deeper and wider than those simplistic terms allow. Simpleminded people are unable to look at deeper, longer-lived historical trends, and understand more profound meanings. These simple minds typically teach in universities and work as journalists.

Those of us who enjoy a deeper game will always include more variables, and more sources of information.

US Democrats Hoping for Defeat for their Own Troops in Iraq

US Democrats who control the US Congress are unflinching in their claims that the US military has already been defeated in Iraq. Until recently, the US media has been proclaiming the same message--in unison with the US Democratic Party. But if the US media does begin presenting a more objective view of the military situation in Iraq, public opinion polls may begin to change. And if that happens, some of the presently lock-step Democrats may fall out of cadence.

When two critics of the Bush administration's handling of the war came back from a trip to Iraq and printed an op-ed article with the title "A War We Just Might Win" (New York Times, July 30, 2007), most Americans cheered, grateful to see some progress.

But while most Americans embraced the good news, the Democratic leadership continued on its pessimistic path toward defeat. In fact, they have little choice.

Since Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid declared, repeatedly, that the war is already lost, he's backed his Democrats into a corner. They've invested so much political capital in bringing the troops home regardless of the status of the job they are doing to back down now would be a tacit admission that President Bush's surge strategy might just have a chance of working.

It's a terrible thing to have to say, but the Democrats have to bank on things getting worse over there. They've leveraged their entire political futures on it. Yet in the long run, it could spell disaster for them on many levels.

From congressional candidates to presidential hopefuls, Democrats who oppose a strategy that appears to have a chance of winning will only further distance them from the average American, who hates to see troops injured and dying overseas, but hates to lose a fight even more.

Democrats are once again in danger of shooting themselves in the foot, a habit they seem to have every time they gain any momentum. If things get worse in Iraq, you can count on them making as much hay out of it as possible.

On the other hand, if things get better, the Democrats will have to make a choice: to continue on the Reid-Pelosi-Schumer party line in their blind ambition to put a Democrat in the White House, or to try to figure out a way to distance themselves from their party in an effort to reconnect with Americans who will jump on the bandwagon.

Source

The Democrats are so deeply invested in defeat--as are many bloggers--that they can only hope the news gets even worse.

Rationally, the situation in Iraq is not one that can be lost, unless the US declares defeat and leaves. It cannot be easily won, because it is the Iraqis who must demonstrate the ability to rule themselves democratically--something no other group of arabs has been able to do.

So we are left with neither a win nor a lose situation, unless the US declares defeat--as the Pelosi/Reid/Obama coalition wants to do. If the US stays, more American troops will be killed, certainly. If the US leaves, it is equally certain that the terrorist "insurgency", more accurately the world jihad, will follow US troops to the homeland. Then more American civilians will die in large scale attacks perhaps much bigger than 9/11.

US military members volunteer for combat, risking their lives in the belief that by holding the line in the heartland of jihad, they are protecting US civilians back home. It is something they are willing to do for the rest of you, including Pelosi and the gang.

And all the Pelosis in the world can do is hope they lose.

Inconvenient Truths About Iraq

Harry Reid and his party cohorts have invested their political futures in the coming defeat of US coalition forces in Iraq. It is to be the grand defeat of the Bush-Chimp-Cheney overreach, and the ushering in of the Grand Democratic Party Millenial Reign. But something happened on the way to the glorious revolution:

The inconvenient truth here is that, apart from the irreconcilable Left, the American people's support for withdrawal has been based on an assessment that we were losing the war. If that no longer seems true, support for withdrawal will melt away. The Democratic leaders know this; that's why they made a concerted effort last week to get a vote on withdrawal in July. September, which will likely see a favorable report by General Petraeus, will be too late. Claims that the inability of the Iraqis to reach a political settlement is a reason for us to leave will ring a bit hollow in the face of a possible military success. After all, the American people have noticed that our Congress, unthreatened by anything more serious than an upcoming election, couldn't pass an immigration bill, can't eliminate earmarks or adopt ethics rules, and can't agree on energy legislation when gasoline is $3.50 a gallon. Politicians, they know, will be politicians, but that doesn't mean we should hand our enemies a victory instead of a defeat.

Source

As I explained earlier to a less than perspicacious commenter, it is my view that one can neither describe Iraq as a won or lost war--despite what slow-witted Democratic Party officials of divided loyalty may say. Iraq is merely a small slice of the world-wide pie of Sunni and Shia youth-bulge driven "revolutionary jihad." The jihad will last as long as the muslim youth bulge lasts--unless Islam receives a badly needed reformation.

Since that is unlikely, it appears that problems in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon, Gaza, etc. etc. etc. will be with us for many decades. In the meantime, much of the effort required of western nations such as the US will involve "finger in the dike" efforts such as the Iraq and Afghanistan military missions.

If the Iraqis and Afghanis are able to outgrow traditional tribal corruptions and inbred ideology and customs--that is all for the good. If on the other hand, the inertia of customs, traditions, and primitive religions holds sway, it will simply be necessary to outlast the youth bulge--devising energy strategies to defund radical muslim terror organisations along the way.

The Shadow Knows

The Shadow is an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that is flown by battalion tactical operations centers (TOCs). These small remotely piloted drones allow the batallion's officers to keep an eye on events occurring on the ground in their area of operation.

Often, on the TOC screen next to the Shadow screen, will be a down-link from a Predator. The Predator can be used as an eye, but it can also launch missiles. There might also be a down-link from an F-16, which can deliver devastating attacks in addition to eyes from above.

...At battalion level, maybe ten soldiers sit in front of these and other screens. One soldier will be the S-2, or intelligence. Another will monitor counter battery radar. Another will communicate with those who operate the UAV, which often is launched and controlled from elsewhere. The battalion can “task” the UAV, but an outside unit actually maintains, launches and flies it. The more high-flying UAVs might be operated from back in the United States.

The larger the unit, the more control stations in the TOC. Whereas company-level TOCs generally are limited to little more than a radio and a map, those at the battalion level are more like nerve centers which actually help coordinate battles, hence the person in charge is called the “Battle Captain.”

The next level up is the brigade and the 30 or so officers and soldiers at a brigade TOC will be clustered around computers and monitors at different stations, often three rows deep. In something reminiscent of the early NASA days, the Battle Captain sits up front in the first row, with computer screens wrapped around cockpit-like. At the next highest level up, the Division HQ, the TOC really looks like a NASA control center.

...The F-16 and Shadow both beamed down live images of the house where the terrorists had hidden after firing on U.S. forces. Now was option time. Which weapon to use? There were so many choices: mortars, missiles, and cannons of various sorts, among others. With the enemy hiding in the building, an F-16 and a Shadow orbiting in the black above, both peering down on thermal mode, the Battle Captain asked the Air Force experts, (the JTACs) what weapons the F-16 was carrying. As a JTAC started ticking off a long list, I was thinking, “How in the world to do those little jets carry all that?” In fact, I believe they were reading down the list for two jets flying in the same package. They carry a mixture of weapons cross loaded between the jets so that they might have the black magic needed for a likely situation.

[snip]...The idea is to get the Iraqis to run their own cities but most of the old leaders are gone, and the new ones are like throwing babies to cow udders. Many just don’t know what to do, and in any case, most of them have no natural instinct for it. So our soldiers are mentoring Iraqi civil leaders, which is a huge education for me because I get to sit in on the meetings. The American leaders tell me what they are up to, which amounts for free Ph.D. level instruction in situ: just have to be willing to be shot at. (The education a writer can get here is unbelievable.) Meeting after meeting—after embeds in Nineveh, Anbar, Baghdad and Diyala—I have seen how American officers tend to have a hidden skill-set. Collectively, American military leaders seem to somehow intuitively know how to run the mechanics of a city.

When Americans move into Iraqi buildings, the buildings start improving from the first day. And then, the buildings near the buildings start to improve. It’s not about the money, but the mindset. The Greatest Generation called it “the can-do mentality.” It’s a wealth measured not only in dollars, but also in knowledge. The burning curiosity that launched the Hubble, flows from that mentality, and so does the revenue stream of taxpayer dollars that funded it. Iraq is very rich in resources, but philosophically it is impoverished. The truest separation between cultures is in the collective dreams of their people.

When I listen to people in these civil administration meetings inventorying the obstacles, giving detailed and passionate speeches about why the things that need to happen cannot, often next comes the tired lament, “You can do these things because America is rich.” This seems like a chicken-egg argument, but it’s not. They will stare at you like a bird. Blinking. Blinking. As if waiting for an answer to a question that seems to forever loop back on itself. “But you are rich! You put a man on the moon!”

Michael Yon

And so on. Defeating the military enemy is only the beginning. Then you must defeat the third world defeatism that is endemic in so much of the middle east, Asia, Latin America, even Russia.

While islamists continue to send their children out dressed in explosives belts, westerners are trying to master the genome, develop nano-assembly of consumer goods, find ways to harvest the riches of the solar system, and so on--further in and further out.

It is a matter of orientation. Third worlders are oriented toward the past--religions, feuds, petty tribal antagonisms and rivalries, etc. Westerners--other than stagnant socialist oriented westerners--are oriented toward a better future, a future of constant change, innovation, and empowerment of the individual.

The psychological battle is larger and more decisive than the military battle, in the long run. A lot of it is tied in with the "youth bulge."

More on that later.

Michael Totten on Patrol in Baghdad

Not About Winning or Losing--The Time Frame is Much Too Long For That

We speak of winning or losing a game we play, or a conflict of limited duration. When conflicts last decades or centuries, those immersed within it speak less of winning or losing, and more of managing the inevitable difficulties. And of the struggle of living up to their highest ideals and standards of behaviour.

The family was treated with utmost respect. The old woman blew kisses at us. The children smiled. This was not a raid.

I stepped into the room and noticed a picture of the moderate Shia cleric Ayatollah Sistani on the wall. It suddenly seemed unlikely that this family was hostile. Still, someone in the house had locked and loaded on patrolling American soldiers.

“We have tight relationships with some of the people whose sons are detainees,” Lieutenant Colonel Wilson A. Shoffner had told me earlier. “They don’t approve of their children joining Al Qaeda or the Mahdi Army. The support for these groups really isn’t that high.”...

“Someone here locked and loaded on me when we did a foot patrol along the river a while ago,” Lieutenant Wolf said. “Who was it?”

The old man laughed. “It was me!” he said and laughed again. He couldn’t stop laughing. He even seemed slightly relieved. “I thought it might have been insurgents! It was dark. I couldn’t see who it was. All Americans are my sons.”

Lieutenant Wolf looked at him dubiously.

“What did you see?” he said. “Tell me the story of what you saw.”

“I heard people walking,” said the old man. “I did not see Americans. I looked over the roof and heard who I guess was your interpreter speaking Arabic.”

“Sergeant Miller,” Lieutenant Wolf said.

“Sir,” Sergeant Miller said.

“Does that sound right to you?”

“Sounds right to me, LT,” he said.

....“I’m a good guy,” said the old man.

“I’m not saying you aren’t,” said the lieutenant. “I’m just very concerned that you are afraid of somebody here.”

“It was the first time. It was dark. I couldn’t see. I’m very sorry.”

“It’s okay,” said the lieutenant. “You don’t need to be sorry. You have the right to defend yourself and your home. Just be sure if you have to shoot someone that you know who you’re shooting at. Thank you for your help, and I am sorry for waking you up.”

The old man hugged the lieutenant and kissed him on his both cheeks.

The family waved us goodbye.

Michael Totten

Some parts of Iraq are peaceful, and most of the residents there do not fear or dislike the coalition soldiers who try to maintain the peace. But the people do fear others. Iraqi death squads inspired by Al Qaeda and inspired by the Mahdi Army and other Iranian allied groups.

The long war between the west and Islam, between modernity and religious primitivism, will continue for many decades yet. I suspect that it will last as long as the Islamic demographic youth bulge lasts, and not much longer. During this long war, there will be advances and reversals--times when it seems the secular west is winning, and times it appears to be losing.

That is the natural cyclical behaviour of disease, of stock markets, of climate, of populations of predator and prey.

In the war against Islamist terror, what would be victory? To me, a victory would be a reformation of Islam that marginalised militant Islamism to the unwelcome fringes of the religion--much as violent political groups are marginalised in western nations.

Perhaps the example of Ireland is pertinent, although on a much smaller scale. As Ireland's financial situation improved and women became educated, the birthrate dropped and the youth bulge subsided. Somewhat simultaneously, the violence subsided.

Certainly it takes only a few people to make a lot of bombs. But it takes a lot more people to terrorize the population as the populations in Iraq, Iran, Gaza, and parts of Lebanon are terrorized. When the terrorists lose their large numbers of "soldiers", their reach will be curtailed.

It will be a very long ride.

If we are tempted to give up and appease, like Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barak Obama, and others of that ilk suggest, we are lost. It is only a deep resolve to maintain our independence and freedoms against all comers, based upon principles that are passed on faithfully from generation to generation, that will allow the enlightened principles of the west to survive the multiple onslaughts that are already here, and those that are coming.

George Patton On Iraq, and Learning From History

General George S. Patton speaks out on history's lessons, and how modern America should apply these lessons to the war on terror, Iraq, Iran, and Islamofascism. As you may recall, General Patton does not take kindly to "cut and run" types. So sit back and enjoy the General's commentary.

"Cut and Run" Just Won't Cut It

It is the collective opinion of leftists, US Democratic Party functionaries, and others of less than expansive views, that it would be best for the US to "pump up" the muslim terrorists of the world by running away from Iraq with tail between legs.

Coalition and Iraqi forces are using a different approach.

U.S. Special Forces continues the hunt for al Qaeda’s senior leadership cells, facilitators and operatives. Multinational Forces Iraq confirmed that Ahmed Sancar, also known as Khattab al-Turki, “a known terrorist and senior leader in al-Qaeda and a key financier and facilitator for the terrorist group,” was killed during a raid on June 23. Khattab al-Turki held several key positions in al Qaeda, and was planning to conduct attacks in the Kurdish north.

Khattab al-Turki, was an associate of Turkish al Qaeda members Mehmet Yilmaz and Mehmet Resit Isik, who were killed during the same raid. “Yilmaz was a close associate of Khalid Shayikh Muhammad, the mastermind behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon,” Multinational Forces Iraq stated. “Yilmaz also led a group of Turks to Afghanistan in 2001 to fight against Coalition Forces.”

Special Forces captured 12 al Qaeda operatives during raids in Baghdad, Taji, Fallujah, and Ramadi on July 18 and 19.

...Coalition and Iraqi forces continue to dismantle the Iranian-backed “Special Groups” of the rogue Mahdi Army. A raid in the Amil neighborhood in Baghdad resulted in the capture of three members of the Special Groups “suspected of facilitating the flow of Explosively Formed Projectiles (EFPs) and other lethal aide into Iraq from Iran.” Also, Multinational Forces Iraq confirmed it captured Sheikh Mohammad Hassan Sbahi Al Khafaji, a key leader of the Mahdi Army with close links to Iran’s Qods Force, along with five associates on June 28 in Nasiriyah.

Much more at Source

The US Democratic Party leadership of this dismal and disreputable Congress has not ideas--other than to pat the terrorists on the back and say, "you win." By giving Iraq to the jihadis, they guarantee another era of terror organisation and execution such as the decade of the 90s when AQE was allowed to use Afghanistan as a safe haven by a weakling US administration, and other appeasement minded elements in Europe and elsewhere.

Iraq--Bleeding Ground for Terrorists

About half the Al Qaeda terrorists killed in Iraq have been Saudi. KSA is the breeding ground of Sunni terrorism, thanks to the kingdom-sponsored Wahabi fanatical sect of Sunni Islam. The Wahabi clerics breed terrorists and send them to Iraq, where they generally get killed.

Over 5,000 Saudi Islamic radicals are believed to have died in Iraq so far. For the last four years, up to half the suicide bombers have been Saudis, and about half the 135 foreigners currently held in U.S. military prisons over there, are Saudis. Currently, American intelligence believes about 45 percent of the foreign fighters (less than ten percent of all terrorists there) are Saudis. The next largest group is Syrians and Lebanese (15 percent), followed by North Africans (10 percent). The other 30 percent are from all over, including Europe.

Source These dead Saudi terrorists are making it safer for the KSA royal family. Imagine the relief of government officials, to be able to send their malcontents to another country where they can be killed by third parties. And the royal family simply continues to sponsor the Wahabis in an unholy truce.

Like the Hotel California or the Roach Hotel, terrorists can check in any time they like. When they go back home to KSA, the government there is happy to lend a hand in identifying the bodies.

More from An Bar Province, Iraq--Update from a Soldier

Here are excerpts from an email from a US soldier currently stationed in An Bar Province in Iraq. He describes the current situation he is experiencing there.

When we arrived in February, we were averaging 30 – 35 attacks per day in our area of responsibility. Now our average is one attack per day or less. We had an entire week with no attacks in our area and have a total of over 65 days with no attacks. I attribute this success to our close relationship with the Iraqi security forces and the support those forces receive from the civilian population. The Iraqi police and army forces have uncovered hundreds of munitions caches and get intelligence tips from the local population every day.

....We recently received intelligence reports that terrorists were attempting to stage attacks from an area south of the city. We increased our offensive operations in that area and made contact with a large group of al Qaeda terrorists that were attempting to infiltrate into Ramadi. There were about 50 well-equipped and well-trained terrorists who were moving toward the city in two large trucks. They all had new equipment, weapons, and explosive belts. Their targets were the tribal leaders in Ramadi (we know this from propaganda videos taken off the terrorists). We attacked these terrorists using ground forces and attack helicopters, resulting in 40 enemy killed and three captured.

Col. J. Charlton, 3 ID, Ramadi

Ayman al Zawahiri, the nominal second in command of AQE (al qaeda, Earth), recently declared that Iraq was the central focus of the world jihad. If that is the case, then it behooves the coalition forces there to convince Iraqis that they want no part of jihad--and to do this as soon as possible. Their time there is limited.