After a while, you get to know how to read the major media about Iraq. Much good news will be reluctantly produced and buried within the paper. All bad news will get banner headlines. But today, the Washington Post leads with the Coalition’s successes in Kufa and the Times publishes this story by Edward Wong, whose reporting has been excellent. The Mahdi Army, Moqtadr al-Sadr’s gang, has essentially withdrawn from Karbala under fire in part from Iraqi soldiers, trained by the U.S. Special Forces. The militia has also withstood terrible casualties in Kufa, and may be on the verge of collapse. Fallujah, for the time at least, seems relatively pacified (if by worrying means). We are, in other words, seeing some modest military progress in Iraq. Politically, we are just at the beginning of a critical period, but, again, the signs are not so awful. The jostling for positions in the new government is surely a sign that Iraqis are beginning to battle politically for new power. Better than a civil war:
A spokesman for Mr. Brahimi said in a phone interview from Baghdad that the United Nations envoy was shuttling among Iraq’s various factions and constituencies, including many of the 400 political parties that have identified themselves since Mr. Hussein was overthrown.
“There’s still a lot of maneuvering going on,” said the spokesman, Ahmad Fawzi. “There’s still shuttling back and forth between all the parties and players. We’re not there yet.”
But you can begin to see the shape of a future settlement. I chart the administration’s arguments for guarded optimism here.
NOT IN THE PAPERS: Jeff Jarvis does a useful summary of the Iraqi blogs. Big surprise: they’re not as gloomy as the Western press.
THREE NEW POSTS: Opposite are three recent pieces: on the integrative promise of May 17 in Massachusetts, the deployment of the Eucharist in the 2004 campaign, and the Bush administration’s strategy in post-Abu Ghraib Iraq.
The Dish 