LOL ... how sickeningly true. I’m laughing rather than throwing up a little in my mouth ... ;)
From: Michael Yon
http://www.michaelyon-online.com/wp/the-ghosts-of-anbar-part-1-of-4.htm
Ironically, in Anbar Al Qaeda has become our best ally for killing al Qaeda. They’ve managed to do this directly, just by being al Qaeda. Despite the promised carrots, what Al Qaeda consistently delivered here was mostly stick, and with a special kind of hypocritical contempt that no sensible person would believe possible. (Not unlike the notion of baking the children of resistant parents or ordering shepards to diaper the corrupting genitals of goats.)
Al Qaeda has a management style—doing drugs, laying up sloppy drunk, raping women and boys, and cutting off heads, all while imposing strict morality laws on the locals—that makes it clear that they have one set of principles for themselves, and another for every one else.
In that kind of scheme, it didn’t take long before people in Anbar realized that any benefits from Al Qaeda having control would not be distributed equally. Once that realization spread, the tribal sheiks—almost all Sunni—had to consider the alternatives.
The sheiks of Anbar turned against al Qaeda because the sheiks are businessmen, and al Qaeda is bad for business. But they didn’t suddenly trust Americans just because they no longer trusted al Qaeda. They are not suddenly blood allies. This is business, and that’s fine, because if there is one thing America is good at, it’s business.
Reframed thus from a position of strength, this stage of the Anbar-war is more a sort of business transaction, where alliances beneficial to all sides—except Al Qaeda—are formed.
From this perspective, there is now a moment of genuine ground-floor opportunity in Anbar, if the people here can see that by doing business with the Coalition, everyone benefits—except Al Qaeda—an exclusion that most can live with.
~~~~~
If true, this would be a huge development. Praying for our troops and for victory.
President Bush Gives Quantitative Metric Of Succss In Iraq
***********************************EXCERPT***************************
President Bush gave a hugely important speech today to a gathering at the Veterans Of Foreign Wars National Convention, and this passage made us sit up and take notice.
>
An average of 1,500 bad guys a month have been killed or captured since January, or roughly 12,000 bad guys year to date. That certainly is a remarkable achievement. But there are definite questions that have to be answered in order to determine how strong of a metric of success this is.
Do we have any intelligence of how many foreign fighters or insurgents there were in Iraq in January? Do we have any reasonable estimate as to their numbers now? Have the coalition and Iraqi forces been able to gain control over the borders in order to stem the flow of foreign fighters coming into Iraq? Do we have any idea of the ratio of foreign fighers to Iraqi insurgents now as opposed to in January?
The White House should be encouraged to release more of this kind of information, and answer some of the natural follow up questions in order to give the American people a truer picture of how the war in Iraq is progressing, rather than let the mainstream media just trickle U.S. body counts night in and night out. The more Americans hear about what is really going on, the more likely they are to disregard the defeatist spin being fed to them by Democrats in Congress and in MSM.