One year ago, liberal journalists depicted the surge of U.S. troops to Iraq as a certain failure. “A lot of people are going to go to bed tonight terrified,” MSNBC’s Chris Matthews opined just minutes after President Bush announced the policy on January 10, 2007. Other journalists were only slightly more subtle. “Many experts warn, it’s too little, too late,” NBC’s Jim Miklaszewski argued on the January 8, 2007 Nightly News. The next morning on NBC’s Today, the network’s graphic describing Iraq was “Lost Cause?”

At the same time, leading Democrats left themselves no wiggle room as they, too, denounced the surge. Senator Barack Obama called it “wrong-headed” and countered with a proposal to pull nearly all U.S. troops out of Iraq by March 2008. Senator Hillary Clinton came back from a quick trip to Iraq to declare: “I am opposed to this escalation,” while another Democratic candidate, Senator Joe Biden, blasted the troop surge as “a tragic mistake.”

....

One year later, the President’s surge strategy is well on its way to succeeding. The Iraqi parliament has passed several laws meeting required political reconciliation benchmarks. Attacks in Baghdad have fallen up to 80 percent in the past twelve months, Reuters reported February 16. Deaths among Iraqi military forces and civilians have dropped by more than two-thirds, from more than 2,000 per month in early 2007 to fewer than 600 per month since November.

And U.S. military deaths have also declined, falling from 126 in May 2007 to 40 in January 2008 and just 29 so far in February, with two days left in the month. Yet this good news seems to have diminished the media elite’s interest in broadcasting any news from Iraq.

"The United States believes a show of support is important for regional stability. We are very concerned about the situation in Lebanon. It has dragged on very long," said the senior official, who spoke on condition he was not identified.

Lebanon's Western-backed governing coalition and its Syrian and Iranian backed opposition have failed to reach a deal to end the country's political conflict.

<...snip...>

The deadlock has threatened to degenerate into sectarian violence and continues to poison inter-Arab relations in the run-up to an Arab League summit in Syria next month.

"The Arab League is engaged but it has not been successful. In those set of circumstances we think a show of support for regional stability and regional solutions is important," said the senior Bush administration official.

Following the brief Israel-Hizballah war in 2006, Hizballah never stopped building its forces in South Lebanon, Lt. Col. Guy Hazut, an army operations officer with the Galilee Division, told journalists on Tuesday during a tour of the border region.

The force-building began long before the assassination of arch-terrorist Imad Mughniyeh two weeks ago, Hazut said.

<...snip...>

Most analysts doubt that Hizballah will launch a cross-border attack at this time. They said a more likely scenario is a terror attack against an Israeli embassy or Jewish institution somewhere else in the world or even the assassination of a senior Israeli official.

Still, Israel is taking no chances. Israel tightened security along the northern border and deployed a U.S.-made Patriot anti-missile missile battery around the large northern coastal city of Haifa following Mughniyeh's assassination.

The army was never under the illusion that Hizballah would open a peace process with Israel, Hazut said.

WASHINGTON - U.S. Rep. John Murtha today said he saw signs of military progress during a brief trip to Iraq last week, but he warned that Iraqis need to play a larger role in providing their own security and the Bush administration still must develop an exit strategy.

"I think the 'surge' is working," the Democrat said in a videoconference from his Johnstown office, describing the president's decision to commit more than 20,000 additional combat troops this year. But the Iraqis "have got to take care of themselves."

This is John Gebhardt in Iraq. His wife Mindy reports that this little girl's entire family was executed. The insurgents intended on executing this little girl, too. In fact, they tried by shooting her in the head. But miraculously, this little girl lived, but is obviously suffering while her body tries to heal. She cries and moans incessantly, but John is able to calm her. The nurses where she's being treated say John's the only one she clings to. So John and this little Iraqi girl have slept for the last four nights in that chair so that she can continue to heal after her injury.

Not exactly Abu Ghraib-like, so it's doubtful you'll ever see this hit the nightly newscast.

Mr Ban said: "There was a clear agreement that the international community cannot turn away from, or ignore Iraq. Its stability is our common concern."

BBC diplomatic correspondent Jonathan Marcus says Mr Ban's tone was emphatic - the time for collective action had come.

The secretary general said there would be a new "regional support office" in Baghdad to foster dialogue between involved countries and an office in the southern city of Basra was also being considered.

RAMADI, IRAQ – In early 2007 Ramadi, the capital of Iraq’s Anbar Province, was one of the most violent war-torn cities on Earth. By late spring it was the safest major city in Iraq outside Kurdistan.

[...snip...]

Al Qaeda met resistance, after a time, from the Iraqis and responded with a horrific murder and intimidation campaign against even children. The Sunni Arabs of Ramadi then rejected Al Qaeda so utterly they forged an alliance with the previously detested United States Army and Marine Corps and purged the terrorists from their lands.

The Iraqis of Anbar Province turned against Al Qaeda and sided with the Americans in large part because Al Qaeda proved to be far more vicious than advertised. But it’s also because sustained contact with the American military – even in an explosively violent combat zone –convinced these Iraqis that Americans are very different people from what they had been led to believe. They finally figured out that the Americans truly want to help and are not there to oppress them or steal from them. And the Americans slowly learned how Iraqi culture works and how to blend in rather than barge in.

[...snip...]

Shortly before Sheikh Sattar was killed near his home he explained the Anbari point of view to Fouad Ajami, the Johns Hopkins University professor from South Lebanon.

“Our American friends had not understood us when they came,” he said. “They were proud, stubborn people and so were we. They worked with the opportunists, now they have turned to the tribes, and this is as it should be. The tribes hate religious parties and religious fakers.”

The issue isn't tactics--doesn't concern the draw-down that the administration has forecast and General Petraeus has now discussed, or how this draw-down should work, or how specific such talk ought to be. The issue is deeper. It's time for Americans to ask some big questions. Do leading Democrats want America to win this war? Have they ever?

Of course not--and not because they are traitors. To leading Democrats such as Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, Al Gore and John Edwards, America would be better off if she lost. And this has been true from the start.

To rephrase the question: Why did Harry Reid announce months ago that the war was lost when it wasn't, and everyone knew it wasn't? The wish is father to the deed. He was envisioning the world of his dreams.

The Democrats' embrace of defeat is inspired by no base desire to see Americans killed or American resources wasted. But let's be honest about it, and invite the Democrats to be honest too.

Appeasement, pacifism, globalism: Those are the Big Three principles of the Democratic left. Each one has been defended by serious people; all are philosophically plausible, or at least arguable. But they are unpopular (especially the first two) with the U.S. public, and so the Democrats rarely make their views plain. We must infer their ideas from their (usually) guarded public statements.

Globalism and Euro-envy are explicit, sometimes, in Democratic pronouncements--about the sanctity of the United Nations, the importance of global conferences and "multilateralism" (except in cases like North Korea, where the president already is moving multilaterally), the superiority of the Canadian or German health care system, and so forth. The Democrats are not unpatriotic, but their patriotism is directed at a large abstract entity called The International Community or even (aping Bronze Age paganism) the Earth, not at America. Benjamin Disraeli anticipated this worldview long ago when he called Liberals the "Philosophical" and Conservatives the "National" party. Liberals are loyal to philosophical abstractions--and seek harmony with the French and Germans. Conservatives are loyal to their own nation, and seek harmony with its Founders and heroes and guiding principles.

The Democrats don't conceal their globalist ideas, but their appeasement and pacifism are positions they can only hint at.

Qods is the covert section of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, the enforcement arm of the Tehran regime. Qods is the only unit in the Corps that answers to the hard-line mullahs.

Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, disclosed the Qods Forces' return to Iran in congressional testimony Monday, but did not elaborate.

Defense sources told The Examiner on Wednesday that Tehran recalled the Qods Forces out of concern that more Iranian operatives would be captured and disclose valuable information about how Iran is funding, training and arming Iraqi Shiites.

From Iranian detainees, for example, the Baghdad command has learned of bases inside Iran where Iraqi Shiites are trained how to ambush American troops.

September 11, 2007: The Taliban offered to begin negotiating with the government. In Afghan parlance, that's the Taliban way of saying they are defeated and want to discuss peace terms. Over the past few months, Taliban attacks have become increasingly desperate, and bloody. But most of the dead have been Taliban. The only "successful" attacks have been those using suicide bombers, and these kill mostly Afghan civilians.

The Taliban were able to build up a war chest in the last few years, allowing them to hired thousands of unemployed young men. But casualties have been high, with over a third of these hired gunmen getting killed, wounded or captured. In the last two weeks, over 200 Taliban gunmen have been killed in battles with Afghan and foreign troops. But the biggest source of problems has been the stupid things they do. Recently, a Taliban group kidnapped a dozen deminers. This sort of thing is very unpopular with Afghans, as even the Taliban (officially, anyway) recognize the deminers as immune from attack. The millions of mines and explosives still in the ground don't discriminate between Taliban or non-Taliban. The deminers are arguably more important to the Taliban, who often sneak around at night in out-of-the-way places. The Taliban also make themselves unpopular by attacking food relief convoys. One recent attack saw 13 Taliban and two police killed in such an unsuccessful attack. The Taliban want to shut down humanitarian and reconstruction projects, and thus force Afghans to support the Taliban in order to get any help at all. Most Afghans resent this sort of intimidation.

Many Democrats have anticipated that, at best, Petraeus and U.S. ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker would present a mixed analysis of the success of the current troop surge strategy, given continued violence in Baghdad. But of late there have been signs that the commander of U.S. forces might be preparing something more generally positive. Clyburn said that would be "a real big problem for us."

"We hear so much about things going bad, but real progress has been made there in terms of security and stability," Couric said Tuesday. "I mean, obviously, infrastructure problems abound, but Sunnis and U.S. forces are working together. They banded together because they had a common enemy: al Qaeda."

Couric traveled to the city of Fallujah in Anbar province, which U.S. forces entered in April 2003 and again in November 2004. That is the same city where, in house-to-house fighting, American forces uncovered nearly two-dozen torture chambers. ...

Now Fallujah is "considered a real role model of something working right in Iraq," Couric said.

The surreality of the change can be summed up by this afternoon. I sat chit-chatting in a downtown precinct with Iraqi cops and newly-minted neighborhood watchmen, junior security officials drawn from the same labor pool that previously drove the insurgency. As was the case last visit, the Iraqis assume that I'm an Arab when they first see me, and express amused fascination when they discover I'm American. Apparently I look like a member of a tribe that lives northwest of the city, whose members sport full beards, lighter brown skin and light eyes. I always respond that there are plenty of Americans who look just like them, because America welcomes all races. Coupled with my prominent camera and status as "a journalist," I rate somewhere between a bemusing curiosity and a very minor celebrity.

Through a local interpreter, we talked about their changing opinion of Americans, Iraq's prospects, the misery of living under al Qaeda, the joys of kabob and favorite soccer teams. Their open and friendly nature is hard to reconcile with the violent history of American-Iraqi interaction in Fallujah, and many of them charitably chalk it up to a "misunderstanding."

Australian Col. David Kilcullen, who just completed a tour as senior counterinsurgency aide to U.S. commander Gen. David H. Petraeus in Baghdad, said in an extensive analysis that the decision by the Sunni tribes to break with al Qaeda could prove a major — if unanticipated — boost to President Bush's surge strategy in the country.

"The uprising represents very significant political progress toward reconciliation at the grass-roots level, and major security progress in marginalizing extremists and reducing civilian deaths," Col. Kilcullen wrote Wednesday in the military blog Small Wars Journal (http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog).

With an estimated 30,000 Sunni fighters in Iraq now battling their former al Qaeda allies, "the tribal revolt is arguably the most significant change in the Iraqi operating environment for several years," he added in his entry titled "Anatomy of a Tribal Revolt." ...

The tactic of forced political marriages was standard for al Qaeda, according to Col. Kilcullen, used successfully in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia and elsewhere to "embed" the international terrorist network in the local kinship and tribal network.

The fundamental aspect of tribal identity is extended kinship [9]. The tribe is the largest unit whose associated clan claims a common lineage or descent. But the tribe is more than just a number of descent–based groups, for an individual’s stated membership in a particular genealogical heritage can be partly a political act. Much of tribal genealogy, if it exists at all, is often based on fictive kinship ties. In claiming a particular ancestry, individuals may align themselves with a given political position and strategy which cannot be simply glossed over as kinship. Tribes exist in a perpetual state of flux. Associations and alliances shift and individuals may move across permeable boundaries. In this sense, tribal identity is flexible since it incorporates an invented quality that provides a context for political and social action.

The clan is the second level of organization in Iraq and derives its unity of purpose from its Sheikh, his family lineage, and the territorial proximity of the various sub–clan affiliates of which it is composed. Sub–clans are a composite of patrilineal groups and extended families. These in turn are composed of kinship groups and divided into households. The tribe and clan performs a political and military function, sub–clans and households an economic one. Leadership is traditionally reserved to the outstanding patrilineal lineage of the strongest sub–clan, with the strongest clan providing the leadership of the tribe. In the case of a pan–tribal confederation, the strongest tribe holds the Sheikh of Sheikh position. In a Hobbesian world of perpetual conflict, weaker tribes will seek security through alliances with larger, stronger ones.

In attempting to explain the situation in Iraq, the idea that "4th Generation Warfare" represents an evolved form of insurgency must consider the fact that tribal society already has at its disposal affiliated social, economic, and military networks easily adapted to war–fighting. The ways in which the insurgents are exploiting the tribal network does not represent an evolved form of insurgency but the expression of inherent cultural and social customs.

...A group of extended families gains control over a sub–clan. The sub–clan exploits existing social, economic, and military networks and widens its dominance through the negotiation of alliances and patronage with other key clans and tribes to win a preeminent position in a new or pre–existing tribal confederation. Once the tribal confederation has amassed enough influence it challenges the state to gain power.

[I] saw her nearly every time I went to dinner in the chow hall at my base in Iraq. She wore an unrecognizable tan uniform, so I couldn't really tell whether she was a soldier or a civilian contractor. The thing that stood out about her, though, wasn't her strange uniform but the fact that nearly half her face was severely scarred. Or, rather, it had more or less melted, along with all the hair on that side of her head. She was always alone, and I never saw her talk to anyone. Members of my platoon had seen her before but had never really acknowledged her. Then, on one especially crowded day in the chow hall, she sat down next to us.

We were already halfway through our meals when she arrived. After a minute or two of eating in silence, one of my friends stabbed his spoon violently into his pile of mashed potatoes and left it there.
"Man, I can't eat like this," he said.
"Like what?" I said. "Chow hall food getting to you?"
"No--with that fucking freak behind us!" he exclaimed, loud enough for not only her to hear us, but everyone at the surrounding tables. I looked over at the woman, and she was intently staring into each forkful of food before it entered her half-melted mouth.
"Are you kidding? I think she's fucking hot!" I blurted out.
"What?" said my friend, half-smiling.
"Yeah man," I continued. "I love chicks that have been intimate--with IEDs. It really turns me on--melted skin, missing limbs, plastic noses ... ."
"You're crazy, man!" my friend said, doubling over with laughter. I took it as my cue to continue.
"In fact, I was thinking of getting some girls together and doing a photo shoot. Maybe for a calendar? IED Babes.' We could have them pose in thongs and bikinis on top of the hoods of their blown-up vehicles."
My friend was practically falling out of his chair laughing. The disfigured woman slammed her cup down and ran out of the chow hall, her half-finished tray of food nearly falling to the ground.

And, eventually, we reached the bones. All children's bones: tiny cracked tibias and shoulder blades. We found pieces of hands and fingers. We found skull fragments. No one cared to speculate what, exactly, had happened here, but it was clearly a Saddam-era dumping ground of some sort.

One private, infamous as a joker and troublemaker, found the top part of a human skull, which was almost perfectly preserved. It even had chunks of hair, which were stiff and matted down with dirt. He squealed as he placed it on his head like a crown. It was a perfect fit. As he marched around with the skull on his head, people dropped shovels and sandbags, folding in half with laughter. No one thought to tell him to stop. No one was disgusted. Me included.

The private wore the skull for the rest of the day and night. Even on a mission, he put his helmet over the skull. He observed that he was grateful his hair had just been cut--since it would make it easier to pick out the pieces of rotting flesh that were digging into his head.

Funny? Of course not. But many of my friends were laughing anyway. That is how war works: It degrades every part of you, and your sense of humor is no exception.

That being said, my character, my experiences, and those of my comrades in arms have been called into question, and I believe that it is important to stand by my writing under my real name.

The rodents were found near the Iranian border allegedly equipped with eavesdropping devices.

The reports have come from the official Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA).

When asked about the confiscation of the spy squirrels, the national police chief said: "I have heard about it, but I do not have precise information."

The IRNA said that the squirrels were kitted out by foreign intelligence services - but they were captured two weeks ago by police officers.

          

Britain's latest secret weapon?

For decades, Arab society granted the Palestinians everything and nothing at the same time. The Arab states built worlds of their own, had their own priorities, dreaded and loathed the Palestinians as outsiders and agitators, but left them to the illusion that Palestine was an all-consuming Arab concern.

Now the Palestinians should know better. The center of Arab politics has shifted from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, a great political windfall has come to the lands of the Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula, vast new wealth due to the recent rises in oil prices, while misery overwhelms the Palestinians. No Arabs wait for Palestine anymore; they have left the Palestinians to the ruin of their own history.