The officer in charge of saving Diyala

AP/Washington Post:

Cigar smoke curled around Col. David Sutherland's face as he sat at his weekly campfire, just miles from the enemy, recalling the days when he paced the front of a classroom, lecturing Army officers on how to capture a town and not destroy it.

Now, those theories are getting a test in the brutal reality of Baqouba, rubbing up against a tough Sunni insurgency and al-Qaida in Iraq.

The 45-year-old Sutherland runs the U.S. military show in troubled Diyala province, a place where Iraqi police are beheaded in public parks.

His men tell stories of Iraqi children covering their ears when American vehicles rumble by because they know a roadside bomb is likely to explode.

Here _ off the public radar screen _ violence has spun viciously out of control in recent months, while all eyes were on Baghdad.

"Diyala is a little Iraq. We've got it all _ tribal wars, sectarian wars and al-Qaida," Sutherland said recently at his office on a U.S. base in Baqouba.

The colonel, who underwent heart bypass surgery four years ago, asked to be sent to Iraq and was dispatched to Diyala in October.

He holds a master's degree from the School for Advanced Military Studies at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., where he was teaching when the Iraq war began. But he plays the role of soldier's soldier _ consciously not the academic sort _ when his officers gather at the weekly bonfire.

...

Behind his desk, a verse from Exodus stretches across the wall in large letters: "Let us deal wisely with them, or else they will multiply and in the event of war, they will also join themselves to those who hate us and fight against us."

...

"As a soldier, I want to be here on the ground," he said. "As an American, I want it to end."

I think he is where the war may end. Diyala is where the enemy is retreating to and Col. Sutherland is getting more troops on the way. In some ways Diyala has replaced Fallujah as a way point for terror in Iraq. He appears to be a wise advocate of counterinsurgency warfare. We should wish him god's speed on his mission.