Found some interesting articles on Iraq I never got to post over the weekend. First is a comparison between the reality of Iraq vs. the fantasy of American politics on Iraq by Michael Gordon, who has been reporting on Iraq for the NY Times and was one of the first reporters to note the successes of the Surge:

I have rolled north to Baquba with a Stryker brigade that cleared the city of insurgents and stayed with a cavalry squadron that found common cause with Sunni sheiks in Hawr Rajab. And from Iowa to Washington, I have talked with the leading candidates who were willing to be interviewed on the war (four, so far) and tracked the ones who were not.

Those were parallel universes, in which the discussion of the taxing road ahead and potential fall-back options were often so divergent that the generals and the politicians seemed not to be talking about the same war.

What is truly amazing about this NY Times article is how it clearly states that those on the left – the SurrenderManiacs – are helping our enemies and keeping their hopes alive by continuously crying for defeat:

“The Democrats talk about this as if the only problem is to withdraw and the difference is over how quickly to do it.”

On the ground with the troops, it is clear that a major military change was in fact made in Iraq last year — not so much the addition of 30,000 troops, but the shift to a counterinsurgency strategy for using them. That strategy made the protection of Iraq’s population a paramount goal in an effort to drive a wedge between the people and the militants and to encourage Iraqis to provide intelligence that the American military forces need to track down an elusive foe.

But counterinsurgency is inherently a long-term proposition, and that assumption has driven much of the military thinking about the future, even as it heightens the political debate at home.

“Unless you are suppressing insurgents the way the Romans did — creating a desert and calling it peace — it typically can take the better part of a decade or more,” said Andrew Krepinevich, a military expert at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

“The paradox,” he added, “is that counterinsurgency requires convincing the Iraqis of our staying power. At the same time, the American people view success in terms of how quickly we can pull out.”

Emphasis mine. And there is our national conundrum on Iraq in a nutshell, as reported by the NY Times because they still have one or two honest journalists left on the payroll. The more the left calls for withdrawal the more they aid the enemy. Pure and simple and now reported in the NY Times.

The next article of interest discusses al-Qaeda documents which outline the mix of fighters who joined the war in Iraq and who probably died killing their fellow Muslims:

Their stories are among the individual records of 606 foreign fighters who entered Iraq between August 2006 and August 2007. The cache of documents was discovered last fall by U.S. forces in the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar.

…

Analyzed and made public last month by the Army’s Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, the documents have led the U.S. military in Iraq to reassess some of its earlier assumptions about the insurgent group and those who carry out most of the suicide missions that are its signature method of attack.

Suicide attacks by the Sunni group against Shiite targets sparked the sectarian violence that swept Iraq in 2006 and the first half of last year. Al-Qaeda in Iraq carried out more than 4,500 attacks against civilians in 2007, killing 3,870 and wounding nearly 18,000, the military announced yesterday.

Based on the Sinjar records, U.S. military officials in Iraq said they now think that nine out of 10 suicide bombers have been foreigners, compared with earlier estimates of 75 percent. Similarly, they assess that 90 percent of foreign fighters entering Iraq during the one-year period ending in August came via Syria, a greater proportion than previously believed.

Many of those who came were not destitute, but delusional. Iraq may be the point where dying for Bin Laden becomes a shame and not an honor. It may be the place where al-Qaeda’s atrocities turn them from the future of Islam into the enemy of Islam. From what the military is seeing the recruits are drying up big time, which is consistent with reports I had noticed late last summer and fall (see here for example). A change of heart in the Muslim world about al-Qaeda would signal the point where we could win out over al-Qaeda for good. And that change of heart is happening right inside Bin Laden’s own family:

The son of the most-wanted man in the world spoke Sunday to CNN in a quiet, middle-class suburb about an hour outside Cairo, Egypt.

Omar bin Laden, who works as a contractor, said he is talking publicly because he wants an end to the violence his father has inspired — violence that has killed innocent civilians in a spate of attacks around the world, including those of September 11, 2001.

“I try and say to my father: ‘Try to find another way to help or find your goal. This bomb, this weapons, it’s not good to use it for anybody,’ ” he said in English learned in recent months from his British wife.

He said that’s not just his own message, but one that a friend of his father’s and other Muslims have expressed to him. “They too say … my father should change [his] way,” he said.
…

Now, he and his wife are preparing to launch a movement far different from the one his father, Osama bin Laden, launched. They are pursuing a movement for peace.

In my view this an opinion ready to break open in the Muslim community. It has been damned up out of allegiance to their own and a hatred for the US instilled by years of liberal western media augmented by fanatical religious teachings. But Bin Laden’s butchers have carved up Muslim kids in the streets simply to show how cold and heartless they are. Bin Laden made an alliance with the devil (criminal sycophants) to try and reach his dream of a Islamic World Order. Instead he has Muslim blood and carnage on his hands. The post I linked to above has links to other Islamic leaders who have recently turned on Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, rejecting their ways.

With the son of Bin Laden openly asking his father to stop his murderous ways I think we will see an awakening across the Muslim community – and history will show it was Iraq that provided the examples from which Islam turned away from al-Qaeda and headed back to the future.