CY:"The gathering signs of progress in Iraq ..."

... "Bomb Attack on Iraq's Parliament Building ... a stunning assault in the heart of the heavily fortified, U.S.-protected Green Zone" (Foxnews, Thursday, April 12, 2007 )

"A homicide truck bomb exploded on a major bridge in Baghdad early Thursday, collapsing the steel structure and sending cars toppling into the Tigris River below ..." (Foxnews, Thursday, April 12, 2007 )

A further example for the MSM-conspiracy against the US-strategy in Iraq?

How many attacks in 4 years have there been inside the green zone?

1? 2? They got lucky, and only took one life. By objective strategic standards, no big deal.

Tragic, yes. A sign of a burgeoning, rampaging insurgency? No. A sign that the US has failed, and has no chance of acheiving its objectives in Iraq? No.

Unless thats what your hoping for.

A couple of other indicators worth mention:

First is the narrowing of focus by al Qaida in Iraq. Initially they focused on the MNF but that failed to gain the support of many Iraqis as the elections demonstrated. So they turned their attention to the Shiia. The idea being to intimidate the Shiites into turning their backs on the MNF in order to make the violence stop. This didn't work either as there was a severe backlash against the Sunnis for it. This resulted in calls from Sunnis for AQI to stop attacking civilians. That resulted in AQI narrowing their focus even further to "wayward" Sunnis. Again, they were going to intimidate the Sunnis into line in order to make the violence stop. But the Sunnis discovered they had an ally in the MNF and Iraq government. So instead of getting the Sunnis in line, they effectively pushed the Sunnis into the arms of the Iraqi government. So where at first it was a Muslim insurgency against "infidel" occupiers (broad focus), it then became Sunnis against Shiites (narrower focus), and has now become radical Sunnis against more moderate Sunnis (yet narrower focus) and the result is a splitting off from AQI of many of the groups ("franchises")under its umbrella.

The second development is to notice that al Qaida has now restarted operations in areas outside Iraq. We saw operations in Morocco and Algeria this week. That signals that al Qaida isn't sending their best and brightest to Iraq anymore. A year or so ago, the people who would be performing terrorist operations in those countries would have been sent to Iraq. Now they are staying home to fight.

I am seeing nothing but positive indications for us and dire indications for al Qaida.

Holy Toledo! A surprisingly positive article out of CNN!

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/04/12/btsc.phillips.baghdad/index.html

"Aligned against these growing signs of progress, we once again encounter our ever-present enemy... Democrats...."

I'll bet you any amount of money you can round up that you will be repeating this divel one Friedman Unit from today. The real enemy is Repbulicans. They are delusional. They hate America.

Remind me again which side of the aisle was comparing our troops to Nazis, TH. We're just handing you the rope until the country allows us to hang you with it. Aux la lanternes!

I'll bet you any amount of money you can round up

Petraeus is going to ensure the dems will be out of power again in 08' and rendered ineffective as enemies anymore.

Just wanted to comment on the "green zone" attack. My FIRST thought was that the U.S. Capitol is a fairly secure place yet there was an attack there. What does that say about our country? That's it's a complete failure and it's time to get out?

All it shows is that a determined person or group can, eventually, breach any security.

Purple avenger is definitely existing in his own seperate reality.
Things are not going well in Iraq the American people know that, the policies of Bush have been all failures. A liberal (why is liberal only good over there) democracy flowering in Iraq ???

When the Imus affair can basically knock the Iraq off the headlines for a week, you know that things are getting better. The MSM will do anything it can to hide this fact.

A liberal (why is liberal only good over there) democracy flowering in Iraq?

How long did it take to fight the revolution and ratify the US constitution again John?

Seems to me the Iraqis are WAY ahead of schedule. Of course your kind would have had Washington surrender rather than tough out the winter at Valley Forge. Your kind don't do difficult.

"A gunman in a wheelchair opened fire on a crowded street in San Francisco's Tenderloin district early Saturday, killing a woman and wounding four other people, police said."

Yet another example that socialism in San Francisco is a failure....heh

"Without any shred of a doubt, we are in the final, decisive phase of this war."

Without any shred of doubt, this prediction will come back to haunt you in a year when the war in Iraq is once again damaging Republican election campaigns.

I don't see how you infer from the excerpts you posted that "the more radical and divisive elements of both the Sunni and Shia sects are slowly but steadily being whittled away" or that Sunni tribes are joining Iraq's police and military forces "by the thousands."

According to the Washington Post:

"Insurgent leaders, in interviews in person or by telephone, offered different explanations for their split. Many said their link to the al-Qaeda groups was tainting their image as a nationalist resistance force. Others said they no longer wanted to be tools of the foreign fighters who lead al-Qaeda. Their war, they insist, is against only the U.S. forces, to pressure them to depart Iraq."

"We do not want to kill the Sunni people nor displace the innocent Shia, and what the al-Qaeda organization is doing is contradictory to Islam," said Abu Marwan, a religious leader of the Mujaheddin Army in Baqubah, northeast of Baghdad. "We will strike whoever violates the boundaries of God, whether al-Qaeda or the Americans." (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/13/AR2007041300294_pf.html)

This suggests that a split between insurgents and al-Qaida has more to do with shutting foreigners out of the insurgency and improving its effectiveness than a fundamental shift to support for the American forces. At any rate, it is not clear how the surge has promoted this.

You may also want to read this article in the Guardian: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/marc_lynch/2007/04/insurgents_against_alqaeda.html

Ironically, as Lynch argues, this split might make it easier for the US to withdraw (by uniting Iraqi factions) even as it makes it more dangerous for us to stay.

There is no evidence to suggest that Iraq would become any more chaotic upon a US withdrawal than it already is, and some to suggest that it might acutally improve once our provocative presence is ended. Anyway, this thing won't be solved by sending more 19-year-old Americans to Iraq and further eroding the sovereignty of the Iraqi state. As a prominent American said:

"Any student of history recognises there is no military solution to a problem like that in Iraq. A political resolution of various differences ... of various senses that people do not have a stake in the successes of Iraq ... is crucial."

The speaker? General Petraeus.

"There is no evidence to suggest that Iraq would become any more chaotic upon a US withdrawal than it already is, and some to suggest that it might acutally improve once our provocative presence is ended."
Posted by R. Stanton Scott at April 15, 2007 04:00 PM

Congratulations! You just parroted John kerry nearly word for word in his argument to pull US troops from Vietnam which caused a full scale regional destabilization that killed MILLIONS! Nice....

ray,

I've looked high and low for information on a bloodbath in S. Vietname after 1975 and have yet to find it. Certainly, you can fold in the Khmer Rouge killings into that number to get to millions dead, but that's a specious argument at best and dishonest at worst.

Here's what I did find: Jacqueline Desbarats and Karl D. Jackson set out to prove that a bloodbath in South Vietnam did occur, in spite of media reports to the contrary. By conservative estimate they said that 65,000 people had been killed from 1975 to 1982.

Their work was refuted by Gareth Porter and James Roberts in 1988 in their article, “Creating a Bloodbath by Statistical Manipulation,” in Pacific Affairs.

In an essay published in 1990, Desbarats claimed “possibly more than 100,000 Vietnamese people” had been executed but didn't answer any of the problems brought up by Porter and Roberts’s critique of her methodology.

So, even if you read and believe the scholars who claim a bloodbath did occur, their numbers have never been more than 100,000+. Tragic yes, but still nowhere near your millions.

You can claim that our withdrawal from Vietnam caused the rise of Pol Pot and the subsequent mass murder, but I could make an equally persuasive case that Nixon's incursion into Cambodia is what destabilized that country, and both of our arguments would be irrelevant to what we have at hand in Iraq.

As always, I'm prepared to be educated. I don't know everything (even though my wife will tell you I think I do), and I invite links to credible sources for your numbers.

DT, the rise of the khmer rouge was a direct result of the power vacuum left when the US retreated

Here's more on the subject

http://www.411mania.com/politics/columns/47625

"During this period of Nixon's phased redeployment, the Khmer Rouge Communists took over the government of Cambodia leading to the extermination of roughly 25% of that countries population, or two million people. This horrendous slaughter on the order of magnitude of the Jewish holocaust might have been avoided if Nixon had not signaled American intentions to wash our hands of the region. And that wasn't even in Vietnam.

After Nixon withdrew all ground forces from Vietnam, the North Vietnamese broke their peace agreements (surprise, surprise) and took over Southern Vietnam that we had abandoned. Of course the Communist atrocities continued there and hundreds of thousands died. It was then that the North Vietnamese implemented the infamous "re-education" camps where the primary focus was to torture civilians into compliance.

Khmer Rouge forces invaded Vietnam, Vietnamese forces invaded Cambodia. The Chinese who supported Vietnam invaded Vietnam in retaliation for the invasion of Cambodia which was in retaliation for the Khmer Rouge invasion of Vietnam. How many more hundreds of thousands of people died because we decided the cost was too high and the war was immoral?"

There are people who still deny the jewish holocaust. I dont care if communist sympathizers deny the mass murder committed by the NV in SV. And yes, destabilization of neighboring countries that kills millions is a part of the equation an honest thinker must face. But feel free to ignore it.

I am constantly fascinated by those who find the killing of thousands of innocent people horrible and tragic--until the United States starts doing the killing.

"Destabilization that killed millions" in Southeast Asia resulted not from our withdrawal from Viet Nam, but from our presence there. This included, as Mr. Terrenoire points out, our incursion into Cambodia, as well as bombing civilian population centers, mining harbors to interdict trade, destruction of rural villages and agricultural capacity, execution of women and children, and support for an unpopular authoritarian government in South Viet Nam, itself as odious as the Communists we sought to "protect" them from.

Indeed, had we permitted the French colonial mission there to fail, instead of adopting it as our own, Ho Chi Minh may actually have established a government based on our own Declaration of Independence and Constitution--as was his stated goal during the 50s. As President Bush himself points out, we can know the intent of our enemies by listening to their own words.

But as Mr. Terrenoire also points out, Southeast Asian history has little to do with what we face today in Iraq (exept insofar as that experience shaped our civilian and military institutional biases). Southeast Asia was about colonialism and how local populations used communist rhetoric and assistance to end occupation of their land by Western powers.

Our invasion of Iraq today is arguably a resurgent colonialism--great powers safeguarding natural resources necessary for their industrial productivity. But to the extent it really is about fighting terrorism, it happened because our government decided that criminal terrorist gangs could be destroyed by attacking associated states, and then associating states with the gangs. This does not surprise international relations theorists, who expect states to see problems in terms of the behavior of other states.

But it is unlikely to solve the real problem and stop the commission of the crime of terrorism. Internationally or domestically, crime will always exist, and the best solutions are to be found first in addressing the conditions that foster it and then developing the institutional structures needed to capture and punish those who continue to live outside the law.

Indeed, we only legitimize groups like al-Q'aida by declaring war on them and elevating them to the status of an organization that can effectively challenge a powerful state. This also leads us to apply a type of force to the problem that is least effective. Instead of permitting bin Laden the glory of standing up to the US, we should be shaming and demonizing him as a common killer of women and children.

The best way for the US to spread democracy and American values in the world is to develop organizational infrastructures that institutionalize small-l liberalism: open trade, individual rights, capitalism, and participatory, transparent government. This is most easily accomplished by talking to people, not shooting them.

And yes, destabilization of neighboring countries that kills millions is a part of the equation an honest thinker must face. But feel free to ignore it.

Ray,

On the contrary, I wasn't ignoring it, I just don't buy the simplistic causality that our withdrawal caused the killing fields. And any article that contains a line like this:

But if you are a liberal who would not deign to be caught caring about American security or influence in the world (other than to point out how immoral that is), how about the humanistic component? How about the utter devastation left in South East Asia?

This loses all credibility. First, I'm a liberal and will happily display my security bona fides any time anywhere. No, this article is partisan BS, authored by a guy named Ray Robinson, and as you quote heavily from your own article to defend your own positions I feel obligated to point out that no where do you prove your point. You makes the assertion that the withdrawal caused the killing fields, but assertions are like opinions and we all know about those.

And I asked for a link to a number of South Vietnamese killed in what you claim was the resultant bloodbath. The only number I could find was 100K, and that from someone wanting to prove your theory, against all evidence to the contrary, that a bloodbath did occur.

I'm well aware of the re-education camps. I make no case for Hanoi or the takeover just as I would have a hard time defending the South Vietnamese regime. You and I can debate that war, and I'd be happy to engage over drinks, believe me, but I doubt if here it would produce anything more than long-winded, pointless posts.

But I did find this line in your article interesting:

So what was the cost of "phased redeployment" versus a strategy of victory? Well for one the US military was demoralized for decades.

Again, this is a complicated issue, but I can assure you that people in the military were seriously demoralized by 1970, years before our withdrawal. I know. I was one of them and I was RA.

So, I'm not trying to whitewash the tragedy that followed South Vietnam's fall, but what you've opened up here is a far more complicated argument. Finding a direct link from the withdrawal to the subsequent wars in SE Asia is simplistic and ignores a millennium of regional history.

To use this as reason to remain in Iraq is, I believe, a rather thin attempt to put this fiasco into a moral light and it sounds a bit desperate now, just as it sounded in 1971 when Nixon tried it.