No, I don’t mean the election. I mean the attempt to retake Falluja. Allawi is giving clear signals that it could begin this week. Upon it hinges the future of Iraq. Yes, if you read Instapundit, you will believe that everything is going well, or at least well enough that worries are simply a function of ignorance or spin. And then you read this report in Newsweek:
the truth is, neither party is fully reckoning with the reality of Iraq – which is that the insurgents, by most accounts, are winning. Even Secretary of State Colin Powell, a former general who stays in touch with the Joint Chiefs, has acknowledged this privately to friends in recent weeks, Newsweek has learned. The insurgents have effectively created a reign of terror throughout the country, killing thousands, driving Iraqi elites and technocrats into exile and scaring foreigners out. “Things are getting really bad,” a senior Iraqi official in interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi’s government told Newsweek last week. “The initiative is in [the insurgents’] hands right now. This approach of being lenient and accommodating has really backfired. They see this as weakness.”…
Throughout much of Iraq, but especially in the Sunni Triangle at the heart of the country, U.S. troops are unable to control streets and highways, towns and cities. And allied Iraqi troops are simply not numerous, well trained or trustworthy enough. Attacks on Coalition and Iraqi forces are now in the range of 100 a day; casualties among Iraqis are far greater. More than 900 policemen have been killed in the past year, according to the Ministry of the Interior. The Iraqi media have been targeted, too: in just the past three weeks, assassins have killed two Iraqi journalists, both female TV personalities. On Saturday, a car bomb detonated near Al Arabiya TV in Baghdad, killing seven.
Most overseas attention has focused on the 160 or so foreigners who have been kidnapped, many of them representatives of Coalition countries. But militants and criminal gangs have also kidnapped thousands of Iraqis, most of them held for ransom. As a result, Iraqi elites are fleeing by the thousands, many to neighboring Jordan. “Iraq is there for the bandits now. Anyone with the financial ability to do so has left,” says Amer Farhan, who departed last summer with his father, Sadeq, a factory owner, and all of their family.
According to Glenn Reynolds, this is all an inevitable downside of an amazingly successful war-plan. Anyone worrying about the conduct of this war “hasn’t paid much attention to history, and warfare. Or they’re just posturing.” Let’s just pray that Glenn is right; and that almost every serious piece of reporting out of Iraq is completely off-base.
The Dish 