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Two colonels with optomistic message in Iraq

Rowan Scarborough:

The Pentagon this week put on display two hardened Army colonels whose messages provided both hope and unease about America's prospects of winning soon in Iraq.
Both Cols. H.R. McMaster and Robert Brown were upbeat about their soldiers' battlefield victories in northwest Iraq against concentrations of vicious foreign terrorists under the direction of Abu Musab Zarqawi. And they testified to a much improved Iraqi Security Forces. Iraqi troops must one day take on the lion's share of counterinsurgency missions if U.S. forces are to leave Iraq.
"We conducted very effective combat operations against the enemy, we being the Iraqi Security Forces and our forces," said Col. McMaster, describing how the coalition fought street-by-street to take control of the northern town of Tal Afar. He said his coalition force of 8,500 soldiers killed and captured hundreds, including top aides to Zarqawi.
A day later, Col. Brown, who commands a brigade of Stryker armored vehicles, said, "One of the great pieces of information we got recently is 80 percent of the al Qaeda network in the north has been devastated."
He said that during his year in Iraq, the foreign invaders had become younger and were poorly trained. He said his brigade killed 500 enemy in several months of fighting last winter.

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Col. Brown disclosed that his forces confiscated a letter from Zarqawi aide Abu Zaid after killing him recently. The colonel said the Zaid letter, meant for Zarqawi, said al Qaeda in Iraq was in a "desperate situation" in the north.

Contrast this story with this flawed analysis in the NY Times. The Times continues to fall into the trap of attributing military significance to attacks, that while brutal and murderous to noncombatants, have no military significance. To the extent tht the war inIraq is a war of attrition, the enemy is too week to attack US forces, yet is constantly under attack and seeing his own forces attrited. The enemy belongs to a hated and shrinking minority of the minority Sunni tribe. His best hope is that flawed analysis like that in the NY Times will help the antiwar left achieve political gains. Fortunately, the antiwr left no longer has a media monopoly.