on many fronts

In ten days I will defend my dissertation proposal. Preparations for that appointment—along with my teaching duties as the semester wraps up—are not sparing much time or energy for the posting of original material.

But time waits for no man, and right now there is oh so much happening, both in Iraq and in the broader war. The links below should keep you busy for a while.

Moqtada al-Sadr's attempted Shia uprising seems to have gone bust. The “Mahdi Army” has either pulled back from, or has been driven out of, the cities of Najaf, Kufa and Karbala, and uniformed Iraqi police are back on patrol. Meanwhile, Coalition forces are not backing down: “The mission of U.S. forces is to kill or capture Moqtada al-Sadr.”

The fog of war still hangs over Fallujah. US forces have maintained an offensive cease fire since the weekend, although if we wake tomorrow to news of renewed fighting that would not be a surprise. It appears that in the Fallujah combat the Marines have been trading casualties at a rate of something approaching fifty to one. But al-Jazeera and other Arab press agencies are doing their damnedest to portray the fight as a massacre of innocents. Expect to hear the name “Jenin” a lot in the near future, even though that incident is best described as the massacre that wasn't.

So how is Fallujah playing inside Iraq? If this WaPo report is accurate, not very well. (But as Steven Den Beste notes, that paper is not exactly covering itself in glory of late.) The Iraqi Governing Council is giving decidedly ambiguous signals. My suspicion is that there is an understood good cop/bad cop ploy in action here. Certainly the Council is concerned about loss of life, even though they must also find mass elimination of insurgents nothing to lose sleep over. But as I read (or heard) somewhere today: if the Council is perceived as holding back the mad dog Americans, even if in truth they have approved Coalition tactics, then the result can only be to raise the stature of the Council among the Iraqi public.

If the WaPo article is correct, then everyone from foreign jihadis to ordinary Iraqi patriots are streaming to Fallujah. That seems a little dubious: the city is undoubtedly under a tight cordon. But this action could nonetheless turn out as an example of the flypaper strategy writ small—indeed, the next two weeks could see the main strength of the insurgency broken, in a futile rush against the Marines.

Still, it is possible to win the battle and lose the larger fight, especially if the al-Jazeera propaganda has the intended effect on the Iraqi populace. Or if a Tet mentality begins to settle here at home—and once again, the mainstream media is bent on shaping the story to fit the Vietnam script. Ace has documented just how quickly the “quagmire” references resurfaced (again) last week. Utterly shameless: but at least we can now judge that a pundit's credibility varies inversely with the speed with which he (or often she) employs the Q word.

The third big Iraq story at present is the upsurge in abductions. A grim trend: and although there have been no confirmed executions, it seems likely that one group or another will decide to make a statement soon. But as Wretchard of The Belmont Club points out, there is a very suspicious pattern among one set of abductions, namely those involving journalists. If Wretchard is correct, then the US is not the only major psy-ops player operating near Baghdad.

That sums up what has been making headlines of late. There is, however, yet another development that isn't making the front pages, although it likely has been ongoing since before the Coalition invasion a year ago. That would be Iranian infiltration into Iraq, particularly amongst their Shia co-religionists. I don't have time to summarize: just go here and here and here and here.

The mullahs are at war with the US: this administration certainly knows it, even if John Kerry doesn't.

Finally: a few days back I posted a photo of a group of US Marines. If you didn't click on the image, you may not have realized what was transpiring when the picture was taken. The Marines were in prayer over a fallen comrade—fallen, as in dying, or already dead. I meant the post as a tribute. But Gerard Van der Leun does it right.

Just go read it.