Word: itely
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...down. Third, this is no longer an insurgency; it's a civil war. Counterinsurgency tactics are designed to help a credible indigenous government fight a guerrilla opponent. The idea that Nouri al-Maliki's government is responsible is laughable: it's little more than a fig leaf for Shi'ite militias. Finally, as Mosul shows, these tactics require lots of time. I asked a leading active-duty Army counterinsurgency expert how long it would take before we knew if the surge had succeeded. "Ten years," he said. That's not a surge. It's a glacier...
...Among Maliki's major political assets were his ties to Moqtada al-Sadr. The argument was that Maliki could help moderate the fiery Shi'ite militia leader. And so, when sectarian violence began escalating dramatically in February 2006, U.S. forces repeatedly held back from a major confrontation with the Madhi Army at Maliki's behest. But there has been no sign of moderation on Sadr's part. Indeed, in November, Sadr ordered the 30 parliamentarians and four ranking government officials of his political bloc to end participation in the government in protest of Maliki's meeting with President Bush. Meanwhile...
...Nouri al-Maliki. After a phone conference with the Iraqi leader, Pres. Bush said al-Maliki had promised U.S. forces would be given a free hand, and that "political or sectarian interference will not be tolerated." Such interference has in the past blighted U.S. efforts to curb the Shi'ite militias responsible for most of the sectarian killing, especially in Baghdad...
...Here's the problem: the person who did most of the interfering, arguably, was al-Maliki himself. Although he nominally heads an all-party, national unity government, al-Maliki is a Shi'ite partisan, and he has pursued a blatantly sectarian course in the eight months since he was sworn in, antagonizing Sunnis and allowing Shi'ite militias to run amok. His main political backing comes from Moqtada al-Sadr, the firebrand leader of the most dangerous militia, the Mahdi Army. In his speeches, al-Maliki routinely promises to deal firmly with the militias, but in practice, he has always...
...kidnapping rings and death squads. Maliki immediately called for Saedi's release, and the U.S. military complied. Killings were on the rise, and Maliki was working to help the leading murderers; Sadr's Mahdi Army dropped virtually all pretenses of restraint after the February bombing of a Shi'ite shrine in Samarra and went on the attack...