Even More Inconvenient Truth from Iraq

The Left must be getting pretty concerned about the amount of positive news coming out of Iraq since the Surge was announced.

I commented in a previous post that even people like NBC's Brian Williams, who went to Iraq recently, could see the good that was going on and that the number of attacks was reducing dramatically.

Today we have two good news stories to report. From the always informative bloggers at Iraqthemodel comes their piece on the capture of Ahmed Farhan Hassan, a senior aide to Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, the leader of al-Qaeda’s so-called Islamic State in Iraq.

And from Azamiyah comes the news that the members of a car bombing ring responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people have been captured including Haitham al-Shimari who was suspected in the "planning and execution of the majority of car bombs which have killed hundreds of Iraqi citizens in Sadr City."

"...the majority of car bombs..." - that really is going to make a big difference.

It should occur to people that things are looking up for the Coalition effort in Iraq. The government has become much more serious about dealing with sectarian violence, tribal chiefs have turned against Al Qaeda in the Anbar province and the rules of engagement have changed so that Iranian Quds forces operating inside Iraq can be captured and held instead of being released as they were previously.

Has the Surge caused this sudden turnaround in attitude? To some extent that appears to be the case but I think that the Surge, when combined with the shenanigans of the Democrats in Congress and the Senate, has meant that people in Iraq realise they only have a limited amount of time to get their act together. In that sense, one has to agree with some of the Democrats' position that we need to be tougher on the Iraqi government, and that certainly seems to have been the case over recent months.