If you only read one thing today, read Michael Totten’s long article about his imbed with Marines in Fallujah.
A snippet:
A sign outside Lieutenant Nathan Bibler’s Joint Security Station in the slums of Fallujah makes the point a little more clearly, and delicately. “Look at everyone as though they are trying to kill you, but you cannot treat them that way.”
“The threat’s always there,” Sergeant Chuck Balley told me as he looked blankly at nothing in particular. “Everybody is sketchy.”
Maybe they are. But very few people in Fallujah try to kill Americans — or other Iraqis — anymore. It has been months since a single Marine in Fallujah has even been wounded, let alone killed. But at least a handful of disorganized insurgents still lurk in the city. Once a week or so somebody takes a shot at the Americans.
Stories like this — reporting that you won’t find in the MSM — is why it’s becoming harder and harder for Democrats to continue with the “surge won’t work” or “we can’t win in Iraq” memes.
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I’m not sure why you think you don’t find stories about the counter-insurgency in newspapers or television. I’m also not sure what the fact that there are some brave Marines on the ground in Falujah has to do with the possibility of political reconciliation between the Shiaa, Sunni, and Kurds.
I’m glad that Sunnia and Shia militia have decided that they are better off fighting al Qaeda than the US but my fear for 2008 is that our policy of arming Sunni militia in Iraq is going to turn out the same way that arming the Sunni militia in Afghanistan did in the 1980′s…
Good piece.
The only reporting we get like this is from Totten, Roggio, Yon, and a few others.