Today's Reading List: 11 Jun 2007

* recommended reading

NPR, Political Struggle for Kirkuk Intensifies.

* NPR, Portrait of a Suicide Bomber. This was a very different piece of reporting. Frightening. I recommend it only as a matter of a different perspective, one that I don't hear very often.

Sunni insurgents remain willing and able to blow themselves up in crowded public places. The story of a 29-year-old man with a degree in accounting shows a suicide bomber in the making.

The Fourth Rail, Iraq Report: al Qaeda strikes the security forces.

PRI's The World, New US strategy in Iraq. #1

[Interview] with John Burns, Baghdad bureau chief for the New York Times, about a new US strategy for fighting the insurgency in Iraq. U-S commanders are apparently arming and supporting some of Iraq's sunni insurgents to fight Al Qaeda militants.

PRI's The World, New US strategy in Iraq. #2 COL Nagl discusses counterinsurgency.

US military commanders are apparently using a new strategy in Iraq. They are trying to get Sunni insurgents to turn on former Al-Qaeda allies. Arming former enemies isn't a new strategy.

NBC Nightly News, Enemies become allies in Iraq.

*WSJ's Opinion Journal, 1968 Redux: Echoes of Vietnam in Iraq--especially from the press.

Though there are valid criticisms to be made of how our military leadership conducted the [Vietnam] war for the first three years--blunders that were worsened by disingenuous or misleading briefings at headquarters in Saigon--there is no doubt that the military finally adopted effective counterinsurgency tactics and was turning the tide on the battlefield. By then however, the early mistakes and distortions of reality by both U.S. politicians and military commanders had so undermined their credibility with the press--a press that was only too willing to go with the flow of liberal sentiment here at home--as to make it all but impossible for the administration to secure funding for the war. Sound familiar?