Iraq: The Alternate Reality Iraq: The Alternate Reality

Strategy Page: Iraq: The Alternate Reality does its usual good job at dispelling liberal wishful thinking and belief in an alternate reality. The more the "surge" works, the more those invested in our failure in Iraq for mostly political reasons claim that the war is lost.

It makes some small interesting points. One is that the Sunni Arab population is now down to about 9%, and is expected to drop to 5% by year's end. Six months ago, Strategy Page was suggesting that it would be down to 10% by year's end, and it apparently already is. The importance of this cannot be underestimated. First, there is the refugee problem - that means some two million have fled already, and another one million by the end of the year. Add to that that these are often the best educated Iraqis.

Another is that the wall that was going up was working. It was apparently working quite well. The car bombers needed to live and operate in heavily Sunni Arab regions for protection and anonymity, and the walls going up were forcing them to go through checkpoints to get out of those areas. But the minute that it was pointed out that Israel had built a wall for a somewhat similar reason, both sides of the ethnic divide demanded that it be stopped. Thus, we see the Iragi Moslem version of political correctness. It may work well and save lives, but if the Israelis do something similar, tough. It is better to take the civilian casualties than the embarassment of being like the hated Israelis.

The article has a lot of other good insights into what is going on right now in Iraq.