Jackson Jambalaya

Iraqi Sunnis take control of their neighborhoods, kicking out the insurgents, The London Telegraph reports:
For all that they despised the group, for a long time Mr Abbas and his neighbours in Jamia, a once-prosperous middle-class neighbourhood of west Baghdad, were simply too scared to defy them openly.
That changed six months ago, though, when the presence of extra US soldiers in the district as part of the "troop surge" gave them the confidence to start their own rebellion.
Today, Mr Abbas's group is one of around 50 so-called "Awakening" movements across Iraq helping to rid Sunni neighbourhoods of extremist influence....
Arguably the best indicator of their good intentions is the effort which al-Qa'eda has devoted to killing them....
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/04/12/wiraq112.xml&page=2

Michael Yon wrote this column for the Wall Street Journal last Friday. Forget CNN, Fox News, NBC, or the rest of the media when it comes to Iraq. Most of the reporters for them do not know what the hell is going on over there. They fly in a couple of times a year for a ten day or so tour and fly back home to report on how they roughed it in the Green Zone. Mr. Yon is a former member of the U.S. Army Special Forces and a writer who has been living over in Iraq for several years now, embedded with the troops and constantly blogging about Iraq. His dispatches are a must read for anyone trying to stay informed on Iraq. He has been very critical of the administration at times and is no dupe. I only take seriously the work of Mr. Yon, Thomas Ricks of The Washington Post (and author of Fiasco, listen to his interviews on NPR and read his articles at WP), and the Gordon of The New York Times. Here are some snippets of Mr. Yon's informed commentary:
I may well have spent more time embedded with combat units in Iraq than any other journalist alive. I have seen this war – and our part in it – at its brutal worst. And I say the transformation over the last 14 months is little short of miraculous.
The change goes far beyond the statistical decline in casualties or incidents of violence. A young Iraqi translator, wounded in battle and fearing death, asked an American commander to bury his heart in America. Iraqi special forces units took to the streets to track down terrorists who killed American soldiers. The U.S. military is the most respected institution in Iraq, and many Iraqi boys dream of becoming American soldiers. Yes, young Iraqi boys know about "GoArmy.com."
As the outrages of Abu Ghraib faded in memory – and paled in comparison to al Qaeda's brutalities – and our soldiers under the Petraeus strategy got off their big bases and out of their tanks and deeper into the neighborhoods, American values began to win the war.
Iraqis came to respect American soldiers as warriors who would protect them from terror gangs. But Iraqis also discovered that these great warriors are even happier helping rebuild a clinic, school or a neighborhood. They learned that the American soldier is not only the most dangerous enemy in the world, but one of the best friends a neighborhood can have....
Equally misguided were some senators' attempts to use Gen. Petraeus's statement, that there could be no purely military solution in Iraq, to dismiss our soldiers' achievements as "merely" military. In a successful counterinsurgency it is impossible to separate military and political success. The Sunni "awakening" was not primarily a military event any more than it was "bribery." It was a political event with enormous military benefits.
The huge drop in roadside bombings is also a political success – because the bombings were political events. It is not possible to bury a tank-busting 1,500-pound bomb in a neighborhood street without the neighbors noticing. Since the military cannot watch every road during every hour of the day (that would be a purely military solution), whether the bomb kills soldiers depends on whether the neighbors warn the soldiers or cover for the terrorists. Once they mostly stood silent; today they tend to pick up their cell phones and call the Americans. Even in big "kinetic" military operations like the taking of Baqubah in June 2007, politics was crucial. Casualties were a fraction of what we expected because, block-by-block, the citizens told our guys where to find the bad guys. I was there; I saw it.
The Iraqi central government is unsatisfactory at best. But the grass-roots political progress of the past year has been extraordinary – and is directly measurable in the drop in casualties....
This leads us to the most out-of-date aspect of the Senate debate: the argument about the pace of troop withdrawals. Precisely because we have made so much political progress in the past year, rather than talking about force reduction, Congress should be figuring ways and means to increase troop levels...
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120787343563306609.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries

Interesting take by Thomas Ricks:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/13/AR2008031303505.html

Earlier post on counter-insurgency doctrine. Too bad the Bush administration hasn't done a better job of explaining it to the American people: http://kingfish1935.blogspot.com/2007/07/counter-insurgency-for-beginners.html