Michael Yon correctly points out that each time we have faced down the enemy we have seen a spike in casualties followed by a massive drop off in overall violence and casualties as we dispatch our enemies:

April saw 49 U.S. casualties in Iraq, the highest total in seven months. Does this mean, as some insist, that the enormous progress we have made since the start of the military surge is being lost?
As one who has spent nearly two years with American soldiers and Marines and British Army troops in Iraq – having returned from my last trip a month ago – here’s my short answer: no.

We are taking more casualties now, just as we did in the first part of 2007, because we have taken up the next crucial challenge of this war: confronting the Shia militias.

In early 2007, under the leadership of Gen. David Petraeus, we began to wage an effective counterinsurgency campaign against the reign of terror Al Qaeda in Iraq had established over much of the midsection of the country. That campaign, which moved many of our troops off of big centralized bases and out into small neighborhood outposts, carried real risks.

In every one of the first eight months of 2007, we lost more soldiers than we had the previous year. Only as the campaign bore fruit – in the form of Iraqi citizens working with American soldiers on a daily basis, helping uncover terrorist hideouts together – did the casualty numbers begin to improve.

What we don’t need is another round of “it will never work” from the liberal appeasers. They were wrong last time and they will be wrong again. They have zero credibility it predicting what will happen in Iraq (it is even worse than their ability to predict global warming). What will happen is the Mahdi will be decimated because Iran chose to (or was ‘coerced’ to) end their support of the militias. And when that happens Iraq will enter a new phase of elections and the war in Iraq will be over – with victory.

I linked to this interview with a major Iraqi Shiite leader in the previous post, but his last statement in the interview makes perfect sense when combined with what Michael Yon is saying. He lays out the most probable future for Iraq, at least the one the Iraqis are working towards:

LAT: Whenever I ask the Iranian officials why Iran insists on an immediate U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq, despite the fact that its Iraqi allies do not share your idea, they evade my answer me and beat around the bush. What do you think?

HAKIM: [Bursts outs laughing] You know political rhetoric is different from heartfelt belief. Perhaps when [Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr] Mottaki comes for a private visit here, he accepts that if the U.S. and its allied forces leave today, the insecurity will spill over the borders of Iraq and make everywhere unsafe. We want the withdrawal too. But first at the end of 2008 we will strike a security and political treaty with the U.S. and then the combating forces will go out, and some staff will stay in the U.S. garrisons in Iraq. Iraq has almost no air force now, and only ground forces have been restored. How can we defend ourselves without an air force? You have seen in Basra. To fight a militia, an air force was needed and the Maliki government had no air force. For sure, the U.S. administration doesn’t want to keep all 160,000 troops there for a long time. But it does not mean all of them will leave Iraq soon.

It is a much more pragmatic and sane prediction than the ones you hear from the Surrendercrat presidential candidates and the rest of the Surrendercrat left. Their answer is to run away and wait for things to fall apart, and then come in again. It is amazing what some people will say to get a vote.

But back to Yon and his crystal clear insights:

To comprehend our strategy here, we need to understand the goals of these militias, which pundits, politicians and the press all too often gloss over. Al Qaeda’s aim was to destroy Iraq in civil war. Allegedly devout Muslims, the terrorist savages were willing to rape, murder and pillage their own people just as long as they could catch America in the middle. One reason Al Qaeda in Iraq can regenerate so quickly, despite being hated by most Iraqis, is that, armed with generous funding from outside Iraq, they mostly recruit young men and boys from Iraqi street gangs, giving them money, guns and drugs.

In contrast, JAM and the other Shia militias do not want to destroy Iraq; they want power in the new Iraq. They did not, for the most part, start out as criminal gangs, but as self-defense organizations protecting Shia neighborhoods from the chaos of post-invasion Iraq, including Al Qaeda.

…

These critics miss a crucial on-the-ground reality: Virtually all insurgencies, however noble their original purpose, eventually degenerate into criminal organizations, classic Mafia-like protection rackets, especially as they achieve their original goals.

With Al Qaeda mostly wiped out of Baghdad, the militias that once defended Shia neighborhoods now prey on them. In Basra to the south, where al Qaeda always feared to tread, the situation is even worse. Practically speaking, that city has been ruled by an uneasy coalition of rival Shia gangs for years.

These animals are not the future of Islam. And the Iraqis have made it clear they see them now as the enemies of Islam. When the Islamo Fascists succumbed to lawlessness and oppression they lost the support of the people, who see them for what they really are. And no amount of Western news media disinformation and glossing over the details will wipe the images from the psyche of Iraq regarding what an Islamo Fascist will do for power . They have lived and died through all this – there is no way to game their reality with propaganda from the West. That is why all the liberal efforts to ‘frame’ Iraq are a joke – you cannot ‘frame’ the forces in Iraq and the Muslim world right now – they are on a path all their own.