The amazing thing is that the genius at ABC and the rest of the dying old media didn't recognize that this was happening since oh, about last fall.

Bill Roggio and the fellow at Belmont Club were writing all last year on the River War and the gradual cleaning out of the al Anbar towns. It's been pretty clear that we were working from the west and north and pushing the jihadis back in towards Baghdad.

As a result the jihadis, backs against the wall, switched tactics. Roggio was talking about their focusing on Baghdad and trying to provoke the Shia since January.

But ABC et al have to have it spelled out for them.

If an anti-insurgency campaign fell in the forest, and some dimbulb journalism school grad wasn't there to hear it, would it still make a sound?

It's not a strategy, it's hatred.

Yes, but before this year they were mostly "getting their hate on" north and west of Baghdad against the US and fellow Sunni arabs. Now they're doing it in Baghdad against the Shia.

Hatred and strategy aren't incompatible. The Sunni and rule of Iraq are.

Mookie will deal with that problem.

> But ABC et al have to have it spelled out for them.

Journalistic ethics required them to wait until it was confirmed by a legitimate source.

They found that hating the US was a losing proposition, so they've reverted to an older passion, hating the Shia.

More interesting is the hatred oj's developed for the Sunnis. oj, rather than back Iranian-affiliated terrorists in the hopes of further beating the Sunnis down, you'd do well to follow the Bush administration and adopt a little balance-of-power realism here. Let the terrorists threaten one another, and focus on helping the democrats win.

I don't hate the Sunni, but the Shi'a are natural democrats whereas the Sunni require a Reformation. That makes one a de facto ally and the other a work in progress.

Shi'ism may be well-suited to democracy in the long run, but not all Shia in the here and now are democrats. What good is it to call Moqtada al-Sadr a 'natural democrat' if he is not, in fact, a democrat?

The Sunni terrorists are all but beaten and the Iraqis, including Sunni Iraqis, are rapidly finishing them off. But the democrats of Iraq, Shia-Sunni-Kurd, still need our help to get to stability and fend off Iran's effort to make them a satellite nation under a controllable dictatorship, as they have in Syria. Don't fight the last war.

Not all the anything are democrats.

Irq doesn't need stability until the Sunni extremists are crushed or even driven out. We're still a ways from there and Mookie is helpful.

OJ's confidence that, having surfed around the internet for a few minutes, he understands the intrinsic nature of Shi'ism better than anyone else including the Shia is touching. It is also consistent with the intrinsic nature of Americans, conservatives and bloggers.

Nonetheless, in Iraq, for all intents and purposes, he's right. The secular Shia and Ayatollah Sistani -- two groups clearly not under Iran's thumb -- have reacted better than could have been expected and have earned the respect and gratitude of any Americans paying attention.

Mort, you've stumbled into the truth...once again.

Though the notion that Ayatollah Sistani is reacting is exactly the sort of insipid American bias you pretend to be decrying.

Sistani is what, 78? Leaving Mookie alive is not a smart move.

Mookie's a lightweight who has diminished himself by getting involved in politics. Robert Drinan doesn't get to be Pope.

A lightweight with thousands of well-armed followers becomes more than a lightweight, no matter how stupid.

And if his life's goal is to be an Ayatollah? What then?

Mort?

No, he doesn't. He can't be one if he sticks to street thuggery. He can be useful to the ayatollahs though.

erp: Apparently I'm Mort Kondracke to his John McLaughlin.

David - Which is why we're in the home stretch in Iraq. Bring the militias under the government and we're done. If Iran fights it, then we have our casus belli against them.

No, I'm Mort.

pj: Better men then I have punted this one, but I do think that when history looks back, it will date our victory in Iraq to sometime in the next 60 days. The insurgency has been rolled back to Baghdad, the Iraqi army is standing up and attacks are declining. All we need is for the Iraqis to get the government up and running.

oj: I'm certainly not Gomez.

"Nonetheless, in Iraq, for all intents and purposes, he's right. "

Much earlier than that David.

We won when the first election was held in what, January 05? The one the Dems said couldn't happen, and hoped would fail.

Those few months of Nov, Dec 04, and Jan 05 were the key. The period btwn our general election and the Iraqi election. We smacked them upside the head at 2nd Faluj and started to take back to north and west. Elections were the killer blow.

Final victory?

Ah Gomez, he died much too young.