ARE WE WINNING IN IRAQ?

I don’t know, but this is surely good news. I was also interested to read this:

Here is what you have yet to hear reported in the mainstream media. In the few weeks since Coalition forces began to launch major counter-insurgency attacks, beginning with Operation Iron Hammer, over 1100 Iraqi Guerrillas have been captured or killed. This represents one-fifth of the entire strength of the Ba’athist and Islamist forces in the country. These figures, presented to President Bush in a secret briefing during his Thanksgiving trip to Baghdad, do not include the forty-six terrorists killed in a battle on November 30th. In other words, the US armed forces are killing and capturing fifteen of the enemy for each loss of their own: and this figure is distorted by the high number of US personnel killed in aircraft shoot-downs in November, a figure which is not likely to be repeated. In individual combat, the results look more and more like those of the last Sunday in November: forty-six of the enemy killed and eight captured with no losses among our forces. At the present rate, the entire force possessed by the enemy will be destroyed, and the country pacified, in a matter of months.

This reads like excessive optimism to me, but I hope he’s right. The best analysis, as usual, came from John F Burns in yesterday’s NYT. He uses a simple conversation to unpeel the layers of deception, self-interest, self-deception and fear that now envelop Iraqi society. It seems to me obvious that in this war, unlike the war against al Qaeda, capturing or killing the central figure, Saddam, is the sine qua non of continuing progress.