Again, my apologies for the lack of posting. I have barely had time to breathe between business travel and helping my parents get through the initial stages of my mother’s broken arm. I have a little bit of a breather here before I begin my next three weeks of business travel. But while not posting I have been collecting stories on how things are progressing in Iraq – stories you will not see on the evening news because they reflect a stubborn progress towards success in Iraq. The SurrenderMedia is only excited with news of possible failure – not sucess. Anyway, in not particular order (except the order I discovered them in) let’s get to a more round view of events in Iraq.

The Economist reviews the incredible changes in Baghdad since The Surge was implemented, comparing the situation in key areas from their apparent ‘lost cause” state in February to where they have come now:

BACK in February, units of the American army were bogged down in an apparently unwinnable battle against al-Qaeda in the west Baghdad suburb of Ghazaliya. The insurgents treated this once mainly Sunni Arab area as a safe haven which they fiercely defended. American troops were attacked virtually every time they sallied from their base, whether by snipers or by booby traps consisting of piles of explosive stuffed into sewers. Human intelligence—the tips that the Americans need for tracking down insurgent cells and arms caches—was almost nil, no doubt partly thanks to the intimidation caused by the two dozen or so bodies of suspected collaborators, often beheaded or bearing marks of torture, that were dumped every month on Ghazaliya’s outskirts.

Eight months later, the picture is quite different. The district has been transformed. American troops move freely through it, dropping into schools and stopping off at markets to chat with locals or to check up on a new citizens’ militia, the Ghazaliya Guards, who man checkpoints throughout the suburb. In the part of the suburb revisited by this correspondent, the insurgents have apparently not managed to launch an attack for the past two months.

This kind of progress is not marginally, nor likely to be reversed. There was very little ground swell in Europe, even in Germany, for a return of the Nazi jackboot once liberated in WW II. People are “Hollywood” naive to think there will be a desire to return to the oppression and atrocities of al-Qaeda and Islamic extremism. Everyone is clearly allowed to have an opinion, and many will be allowed to have seriously flawed ones. It is a free country after all.

The reason this progress is not reversible is because the progress is due to a major shift in where the Iraqi street is now pushing to go. Before it was pushing to defeat America, now it is pushing to defeat al-Qaeda and make their democratic government work. This change in attirtude can be seen in the way al-Qaeda is being outted through tips from locals to American and Iraqi forces with the intent (and result) they be destroyed:

In a mission in Tikrit, three suspected terrorists were detained and one of the individuals was wanted for facilitating foreign terrorists. According to MNF-I, this individual is wanted for assisting the movement of foreign fighters and connected to current and prior leaders of the insurgent network.

Coalition Forces detained a total of five suspected terrorists with ties to a Syrian-based extremist network in Ar Ramadi. The main target had connections to a senior leader named Muthanna, who was killed Sept. 11. Muthanna played a large role in the facilitation of foreign fighters between Syria and Iraq. During this operation, suspected IED making materials and a number of Iraqi police uniforms were confiscated.

A wanted AQI weapons smuggler and terrorist cell leader was captured by Coalition Forces in Baqubah. During operations in the past, he has been targeted by Coalition Forces and is known to associate with senior AQI leadership. Two other insurgents were captured without any incident.

An insurgent who is believed to be the newly selected leader of an AQI cell was captured by Coalition Forces in Baghdad. This is part of a larger crack down on a car-bombing ring in the area and two other individuals were arrested as well.

…

Three insurgents were detained in Salman Pak Oct. 11 following tips they received from locals. This was done during Operation Belleau Wood, which was a mission to capture and disrupt AQI cells.

Maj. John Cushing, 1-15th Regiment operations officer, gives a lot of credit to the concerned citizens who have stepped up to help rid the area of AQI. “Local Iraqi Sheiks, in very dangerous areas, are coming forward and are willing to provide critical information concerning extremist activities in our area of operations,” Cushing said. “Local Sheiks and Coalition forces are working together and doing what it takes to improve security in insurgent infested neighborhoods.”

The article above is replete with small successes. But it is the ever growing wave of small successes that is turning the tide in Iraq. Not to go overboard on the water analogies, but a tsunami is really made up of simple drops of water. It is the general combined and coordinated motion of those drops which can create a force of nature so strong humanity can divert it. When summing up these small steps, with the occasional big leap we see in stories like this one on the massive rounding up of extremists in Iraq, then it is clear to which result all these small events are marching towards.

The SurrenderMedia keeps looking for the “Easy Button” that will make success in Iraq a sure thing in under 30 seconds. But they do have to report on the progress, not matter how many caveats of doom and gloom it requires to ‘balance’ their reporting:

If you are waiting for Iraq to heal its sectarian wounds, Baghdad is the wrong place to look. If reconciliation can happen anywhere, it may be in the country’s war-torn margins, where some locals say they’ve had enough of the violence and are trying to come together around common goals with or without the central government’s help.

That’s apparently the case with the region around the Iraqi town of Mahmudiyah, a district on Baghdad’s rural southern fringe, which until recently was best known for its place in the Triangle of Death. Mahmudiyah was where five U.S. soldiers were killed and three kidnapped in May. But local Iraqis there are now trying to soften its violent reputation and even make Mahmudiyah and its surrounding political district a model for peace and reconciliation among Iraqis and with Coalition troops.

Actually, much of Baghdad’a unrest came from al-Qaeda strongholds in the surrounding provinces launching attacks on capitol city. So to tame the outer rings of the city IS the path to taming Baghdad. The fact is progress is being made in the way it makes sense it would have to happen. And no armchair, pretend general in the News Media can change the dynamics. They can only emphasize their ignorance of how these things work – which they do quite often and quite well.

As Michael Ledeen so aptly pointed out in the Wall Street Journal recently, a few months ago those of us who noted a strong opportunity for sucess in Iraq would have been seen as having signs of serious dementia:

Should we declare victory over al Qaeda in the battle of Iraq?

The very question would have seemed proof of dementia only a few months ago, yet now some highly respected military officers, including the commander of Special Forces in Iraq, Gen. Stanley McCrystal, reportedly feel it is justified by the facts on the ground.

These people are not suggesting that the battle is over. They all insist that there is a lot of fighting ahead, and even those who believe that al Qaeda is crashing and burning in a death spiral on the Iraqi battlefields say that the surviving terrorists will still be able to kill coalition forces and Iraqis. But there is relative tranquility across vast areas of Iraq, even in places that had been all but given up for lost barely more than a year ago. It may well be that those who confidently declared the war definitively lost will have to reconsider.

I wish I had more time to post the other stories I have found, but with all the balls in the air right now it ain’t going to happen. At the same time I am not nearly concerned about Iraq, or the Surrendercrats efforts to create a failure out of whole clothe, because the situation there is now running on its own momentum. Nothing printed or blurted out by those in denial back here can change the course of Iraq. It has always been on a path of its own making the moment Saddam fled into his hidey-hole. And now we can see the general outlines of what the result will be.