[Rhodes22-list] Iraq - Yawn

[Brad Haslett]

Paris may or not collect $1M for her story, the girl from Ohio has been
found dead, gasoline is high, and what's on TV?  Oh yeah, we were at war
this week.  NPR dutifully reported the number of American soldiers killed,
right on schedule.  AQ is on the run, which is good news, unless of course
you subscribe to the theory that they are the modern version of
'minutemen'.  Brad


Big battle, small news Mainstream media virtually ignore the major U.S. push
in Iraq

Sunday, June 24, 2007
By Jack Kelly, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Imagine it's June 7, 1944, the day after the D-Day invasion. You pick up
your newspaper. There's no mention of Normandy on the front page, and only a
brief reference to it in a roundup story on an inside page.

      * Jack Kelly is a columnist for the Post-Gazette and The Blade of
Toledo, Ohio (jkelly at post-gazette.com, 412-263-1476).*     The biggest
battle since the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein's regime is under way
in Iraq. It's outcome could determine whether the war is won or lost. But
our news media have paid less attention to it than to Paris Hilton's legal
troubles.

The heart of the offensive is Operation Arrowhead Ripper, in Diyala province
northeast of Baghdad, involving some 8,000 American and 2,000 Iraqi troops.

Many members of al-Qaida fled from Baghdad to Diyala, which borders on Iran,
when the U.S. troop surge began in January. There are thought to be between
1,000 and 2,000 hard-core al-Qaida fighters in Diyala, mostly in the
provincial capital of Baquba.

"They are ready for us," said former special forces soldier Michael Yon, now
a freelance journalist embedded with the U.S. troops. "Giant bombs are
buried in the roads. Snipers have chiseled holes in walls so they can shoot
not from roofs or windows, but from deep inside buildings, where we cannot
see the flash or hear the shots ... Car bombs are already assembled. Suicide
vests are prepared."

It's no coincidence that Arrowhead Ripper began within days of the arrival
in Baghdad of the fifth and final brigade of the troop surge.

"The U.S. ability to shift 10,000 coalition soldiers into a major operation
outside Baghdad in the midst of a major security crackdown is the mark of
significant operational flexibility," said STRATFOR, a private intelligence
service. "This flexibility will allow the United States to keep pressure on
the jihadists and thus impede their ability to plan complex operations."

Chiefly because of a shortage of troops, American offensives in the past
have tended just to push insurgents from one part of Iraq to another.
Arrowhead Ripper is different.

"The idea this time is not to chase al-Qaida out, but to trap and kill them
head on, or in ambushes or while they sleep," Mr. Yon said.

"The city is cordoned, neighborhoods are identified as friendly or enemy
territory, the neighborhoods are then segmented and forces move in," wrote
Bill Roggio in his invaluable blog, Fourth Rail. "The combat operations are
then immediately followed by humanitarian and reconstruction projects."

Simultaneous offensives are being conducted in another insurgents' rat's
nest, Babil province southwest of Baghdad, and in Baghdad neighborhoods
where coalition soldiers in the past have been reluctant to go.

Simultaneous offensives are the best way to gain decisive victory over a
numerically inferior force, because they prevent the enemy from shifting
forces from one front to another. The Union did not prevail in our Civil War
until Grant attacked in the East at the same time as Sherman attacked in the
West.

Our soldiers are being assisted by former insurgents who have turned against
al-Qaida. Unlike the Anbar Salvation Council on which it is modeled, the
Diyala Salvation Front isn't strong enough to take on al-Qaida by itself.
But the intelligence its members provide could prove invaluable to our
troops.

You haven't heard of the Anbar Salvation Council? Maybe that's because our
news media have tended to treat good news from Iraq as no news. When Thomas
Ricks of The Washington Post reported last September that a senior Marine
intelligence officer thought Anbar province had been "lost politically," his
story attracted enormous attention from his fellow journalists. Google lists
789,000 references to that one story.

The Anbar Salvation Council, a coalition of 41 Sunni tribes under the
leadership of Sheik Abdul Sattar al-Rishawi, has in very short order
reversed that situation (if it were ever as dire as Col. Pete Devlin
imagined). Al-Qaida has been all but driven out of Iraq's "Wild West." But
Google lists only 114,000 mentions of the Anbar Salvation Council. (Paris
Hilton has nearly 76 million mentions.)

The Anbar Salvation Council model is spreading. The Diyala Salvation Front
was formed in May. More than 10 tribes in Baghdad and its suburbs have
banded together to fight al-Qaida, USA Today reported Tuesday.

If Arrowhead Ripper succeeds, al-Qaida in Iraq will suffer a blow from which
it may not recover. "In Diyala, both the foreign jihadists and their
domestic allies are beginning to feel cornered, with few places left to
hide," STRATFOR said.

But if Arrowhead Ripper succeeds, you may not hear much about it. A U.S.
victory would be too embarrassing for those in the media who have staked
their reputations on defeat.