Some news from the war

Michael J Totten is bait in Iraq.

BAGHDAD – “We want to use you as bait,” Sergeant Eduardo Ojeda from Los Angeles, California, told me before I embedded with his unit on what was shaping up to be a night raid.
“Excellent,” I said. “That’s why I’m here.”

"The Iraqi counter-insurgency would be a hard war to film accurately. Most of the time it’s so quiet. But it’s the quiet of an Alfred Hitchcock movie..."

Totten-“I love my job,” I said. “It’s the best I’ve ever had. Do you like yours?”

Soldier-“I wouldn’t say it’s the worst decision I ever made,” he said. “It’s hard for soldiers. We all want to go home, of course. But we also want to stay and make sure our buddies did not die for nothing.”

And from the New York Times, (of all papers!) : A War We Just Might Win

"Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with."
"But for now, things look much better than before. American advisers told us that many of the corrupt and sectarian Iraqi commanders who once infested the force have been removed. The American high command assesses that more than three-quarters of the Iraqi Army battalion commanders in Baghdad are now reliable partners (at least for as long as American forces remain in Iraq)."(emphasis mine)
"But there is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008." (Are you listening to the LIBERAL papers, Senators?)