Page Nine

The Washington Post has picked up on yesterday's news that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki made a surprise visit to Ramadi, once a Sunni insurgent and al Qaeda stronghold.  This is the Prime Minister's first visit to the Anbar province since he took office, and it represents the shift towards politics as a solution to the violence in Iraq.  It rates page A09 coverage:

By Sudarsan Raghavan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, March 14, 2007; Page A09

RAMADI, Iraq, March 13 -- For months in this battered city, Sunni Muslim militants took over mosques and used their loudspeakers to broadcast propaganda. So a few weeks ago, U.S. soldiers went to the local market, bought speakers and placed them on a tall, white tower inside their base.

Al Maliki was accompanied by General David Petraeus who had urged him to make the trip and gave him the spotlight when they arrived.  The Post reports,

Maliki and Petraeus flew together from Baghdad in a convoy of Black Hawk helicopters. Upon landing, Petraeus exited from one side and Maliki stepped out the other to a crush of welcoming officials and cameramen...

In closed meetings, Maliki promised to improve electricity services, rebuild the war-shattered infrastructure and compensate residents for property damaged in battles or by insurgent attacks, Iraqi state television reported.

Maliki also met with Sunni tribal sheiks who came from across the vast western province, stretching from Baghdad to the borders with Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Syria.

Many of the sheiks have turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq and other Sunni militants and aligned themselves with U.S. forces and the Iraqi government. The U.S. military has been courting the tribal leaders, many of whom were once sympathetic to the Sunni insurgency, to break with al-Qaeda in Iraq.

General Petraeus has been rewarded with early success, and the Post has very little choice but to report it.  But while terrorist bomb blasts and civilian carnage consistently rate front page billing as does the usual Post analysis that pretends to reveal evidence of Bush Administration failure or incompetence, signs of success go to the back pages.  But the success is there.

In a recent three-week operation, U.S. military officials said, U.S. troops had pushed the insurgents farther east and north of Ramadi's center. The violence had dropped by 70 percent, according to their statistics. But on Monday, a suicide bomber wounded 11 in an area under the control of Iraqi and U.S. troops.

"The enemy is trying to regain, to save face," Col. John Charlton, commander of the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, told Petraeus.

The troop surge may very well owe much of its success just to the fact that it occurred.  Iraqi civilians have been forced to pick sides.  If they are persuaded that U.S. forces will abruptly pull out, leaving them to the tender mercies of al Qaeda, the Baathist insurgents, or the Mahdi army, it will not be the American side they pick.  Little by little they are persuaded that the Americans will stay.

In one neighborhood that was cleared, Petraeus walked through the streets, speaking with residents. One man informed him that U.S. troops had destroyed his shop during a battle. Petraeus asked one of his officers to look into the matter. As he headed back to the convoy, he stopped at a house, spoke a few words in Arabic and, looking at his soldiers, told the family: "Meet your new neighbor."

Page nine.

Comments

[Trevor]

Thank you for posting this. Everyone has to pick a side sooner or later. Here we are four years into a war and so many people here at home still don't understand that they either support America or they support Islamists. You cannot have both.

[Tom Bowler]

So many seem oblivious to the interpretations that can be put on their politicking here in America by those Islamists in Middle East. Calling them oblivious is a kindness, though.