This Morning on NBC's Meet The Press, Imperial spokesman Sen. Lindsay Graham trotted out to say that the troops surge in Iraq is a success and look no further than the western al-Anbar province and Ramadi as proof. But Graham is putting the cart before the horse; I was deployed to Ramadi as little as six months ago, working a counter-IED mission, and I can assert that violence levels started to decline back in the fall. Furthermore, Graham made this argument to Sen. Jim Webb, whose son just returned from service in Ramadi.
So why has the violence dropped? Well, the locals were tired of getting killed by foreign insurgents, so they organized. This is primarily due to the work of the most powerful Man in Western Iraq, Sheikh Abdul Sattar al-Rishawi. Sheikh Sattar has organized militias to snuff out al-Qaida all over al-Anbar, and his forces have moved into Diyala province of late.
The US military is not defeating al-Qaida in Iraq -- locals with torches and pitchforks are. What's ironic is that the two biggest neoconservative mouthpieces in the country, The Weekly Standard and The National Review, have acknowledged the role of Sattar and locals in destroying al-Qaida. From the Weekly Standard:
This led to the formation of a tribal council called the Sahawa Al Anbar, or Al Anbar Awakening, which "was designed to wake up the people of Anbar, who have been, for the last two years, allowing al Qaeda in Iraq and other elements to control the city and province of Al Anbar," Patriquin explained. "It started in August 2006 with 40 sheikhs representing 20 tribes from Al Anbar, and currently has over 50 sheikhs representing at least 25 tribes. There is currently tribal representation covering all of Al Anbar province, and they have provided more than 70 percent of our IP recruits in the last few months."
But the Bush administration prefers to defy reality. Instead, they claim that the surge rooted out al-Qaida in Ramadi SIX MONTHS before the surge was even discussed.
-- Capt. Travis Patriquin, the officer interviewed in the story and one of the few officers in the US Army who understood that only Iraqis can secure their own country, was killed by an IED in mid-December (immediately after taking Oliver North and some other journalists on a tour of the city). Before he died, he produced this Powerpoint presentation (now in PDF), where he used stick figures and tongue-in-cheek humor to attack the Coalition's anti-tribe policies and explain how only Iraqis can provide security; it is said that he made the presentation simple enough for both a 4th grader and the 4th ID to understand.
