Good News from Iraq: 24 Apr 2007

From the Weekly Standard, an article about whether Petraeus can pull it off. Do you really care about what is going on in Iraq? If you do, you will want to read this whole article (at some point soon). An absolute must read. (hat tip Bill Roggio)

Here is an excerpt about Al Anbar Province . . .

. . . The tribal forces [in Ramadi] are still too weak to defeat al Qaeda's ruthless fighters on their own (and probably always will be), but they have been of critical help in generating tips that aid Coalition forces. They are also now encouraging their sons to join the Iraqi police and army. Last year, few if any Sunnis were signing up. Now so many are eager to join that training facilities are swamped and there is a waiting list of recruits. Sunnis are also willing to serve in local governments. Ramadi has just installed a new mayor and city council.

Colonel [John W.] Charlton [commander of the 1st Brigade Combat Team of the 1st Armored Division] and his battalion commanders have taken advantage of this newfound willingness to cooperate on the part of the sheikhs. Ramadi now has some 4,000 police officers as well as an irregular militia that is being integrated into the police force. It also has effective Iraqi army units, which are integrating more Sunnis into their ranks. But even the largely Shiite soldiers of the two brigades already in Ramadi have shown their mettle alongside American troops. One of the most encouraging sights I saw in Ramadi was an Iraqi army sergeant-major, a Shiite from Baghdad, supervising the rebuilding of a Sunni neighborhood and chatting amiably with the residents. This is the kind of intercommunal cooperation that was once the norm in Iraq and can be again if Shiite and Sunni extremists are defeated at gunpoint.

Ramadi is not an isolated example. There is progress across Anbar province, especially in such towns as Qaim and Hit, which have become remarkably calm after years of violence. General Petraeus was able to stroll through Hit on March 10 while eating an ice cream cone. . . .

And in Baghdad . . .

. . . More U.S. soldiers now live in the neighborhoods they patrol, in Joint Security Stations such as the one that I visited in Hurriya in western Baghdad. Here soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division sleep and work alongside men from the Iraqi army and National Police. . . . As they have established their presence, soldiers have found the number of tips from residents appreciably increasing. This makes U.S. soldiers safer. They are no longer simply speeding down streets in their armored Humvees hoping not to hit an IED. They are now conducting targeted raids and foot patrols, the basis of any effective counterinsurgency.

I went along on one such stroll on the evening of Monday, April 9, in the heavily Shiite neighborhood of Kadhamiya in northwestern Baghdad. This was the fourth anniversary of the liberation of Iraq, a day that Shiite cleric and militia leader Moktada al-Sadr had designated a day of protest, but things were pretty quiet when Captain David Brunais led a dozen men from the 82nd Airborne Division out of Forward Operating Base Justice into the warm spring air. His soldiers spread out on both sides of the street, keeping a vigilant eye for trouble using their night-vision goggles. The only major problem we encountered was a serious car crash (a taxi flipped upside down), but the Iraqi army had the situation well in hand. As we were standing there, a dozen Iraqi Humvees screeched up, sirens blaring. We kept on walking, pausing only to sit down and share cans of Pepsi with some men smoking hookah pipes at an outdoor café. Brunais joked around with them, having come to know them since his arrival in the area in February in the first wave of the surge. Through an interpreter, he asked what their concerns were and explained why the government had decided to impose a ban on vehicular traffic that day. It is through such amicable encounters that soldiers gain the intelligence necessary to wage a successful campaign against an unseen foe.

While this patrol was undertaken by American forces alone, more and more patrols in Baghdad are now joint endeavors. One of the great achievements of recent months has been the willingness of Iraqi army formations to deploy to Baghdad with more than 85 percent of their strength. Many of these units, especially those composed primarily of Kurdish troops, have already proven highly effective. . . .

And about Iraqi Special Operations Forces . . .

. . . The Iraqis showed off their equipment, which is every bit as good as that of their American Special Forces counterparts. They demonstrated their skills in a state-of-the-art "shoot house," followed by a mock hostage rescue mission in a cavernous training facility. (My ears are still ringing from all the C2 explosives used to blow open a wooden door.) Their American liaisons, all veteran Green Berets, proudly told me that the Iraqis are capable of planning and executing their own missions.

. . .