(Readers know that we do not focus on Iraq, mainly because so many others do it better and because our military sophistication is minimal. We have also mentioned that, while skeptical about going into Iraq, we have also seen great geopolitical opportunities there for the US, the Iraqi people, the ME, and for the benefit of the world in general, if the progress continues. Failure is not an option.)
The ring on your finger: Totten. A quote:
According to the conventional narrative, Al Qaeda was rejected by Iraqis because they murdered Iraqis. They were far more vicious and hateful than the Americans they vowed to expel. The narrative is correct, as far as it goes, but Al Qaeda is detested for more than mere thuggery. Other armed groups have been able to maintain at least some popularity even though they also murder Iraqis. None of the others, though, violent though they may be, are so thoroughly totalitarian, so alien to the traditions of Iraqi culture, and so hostile to its centuries-old social fabric. Al Qaeda in Iraq tears at Iraq’s traditional culture as viciously as Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge did in Cambodia.
If you want to understand Al Qaeda in Iraq – its methods, its rise, and its fall – you’ll find their story has more in common with the Shining Path’s guerrilla and terrorist war in Peru than with the Islamic religion as practiced in the mosques of Fallujah.
From Michael Yon, a quote:
We now have a large number of American and British officers who can pick up a phone from Washington or London and call an Iraqi officer that he knows well—an Iraqi he has fought along side of—and talk. Same with untold numbers of Sheiks and government officials, most of whom do not deserve the caricatural disdain they get most often from pundits who have never set foot in Iraq. British and American forces have a personal relationship with Iraqi leaders of many stripes. The long-term intangible implications of the betrayal of that trust through the precipitous withdrawal of our troops could be enormous, because they would be the certain first casualties of renewed violence, and selling out the Iraqis who are making an honest-go would make the Bay of Pigs sell-out seem inconsequential. The United States and Great Britain would hang their heads in shame for a century.
From Done with Mirrors:
The insurgents would be finished when an Iraqi soldier in uniform boarded a bus, got off at his local market, and walked home.It seemed a million miles away then. Well, based on this picture taken Sunday, it's come -
64,000 Iraqis return home from Syria. Gateway
