Big battle, small minds in the news room

Jack Kelly:

Imagine it's June 7, 1944, the day after the D-Day invasion. You pick up your newspaper. There's no mention of Normandy on the front page, and only a brief reference to it in a roundup story on an inside page.

The biggest battle since the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein's regime is under way in Iraq. It's outcome could determine whether the war is won or lost. But our news media have paid less attention to it than to Paris Hilton's legal troubles.

The heart of the offensive is Operation Arrowhead Ripper, in Diyala province northeast of Baghdad, involving some 8,000 American and 2,000 Iraqi troops.

Many members of al-Qaida fled from Baghdad to Diyala, which borders on Iran, when the U.S. troop surge began in January. There are thought to be between 1,000 and 2,000 hard-core al-Qaida fighters in Diyala, mostly in the provincial capital of Baquba.

"They are ready for us," said former special forces soldier Michael Yon, now a freelance journalist embedded with the U.S. troops. "Giant bombs are buried in the roads. Snipers have chiseled holes in walls so they can shoot not from roofs or windows, but from deep inside buildings, where we cannot see the flash or hear the shots ... Car bombs are already assembled. Suicide vests are prepared."

It's no coincidence that Arrowhead Ripper began within days of the arrival in Baghdad of the fifth and final brigade of the troop surge.

"The U.S. ability to shift 10,000 coalition soldiers into a major operation outside Baghdad in the midst of a major security crackdown is the mark of significant operational flexibility," said STRATFOR, a private intelligence service. "This flexibility will allow the United States to keep pressure on the jihadists and thus impede their ability to plan complex operations."

Chiefly because of a shortage of troops, American offensives in the past have tended just to push insurgents from one part of Iraq to another. Arrowhead Ripper is different.

"The idea this time is not to chase al-Qaida out, but to trap and kill them head on, or in ambushes or while they sleep," Mr. Yon said.

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Simultaneous offensives are being conducted in another insurgents' rat's nest, Babil province southwest of Baghdad, and in Baghdad neighborhoods where coalition soldiers in the past have been reluctant to go.

Simultaneous offensives are the best way to gain decisive victory over a numerically inferior force, because they prevent the enemy from shifting forces from one front to another. The Union did not prevail in our Civil War until Grant attacked in the East at the same time as Sherman attacked in the West.

Our soldiers are being assisted by former insurgents who have turned against al-Qaida. Unlike the Anbar Salvation Council on which it is modeled, the Diyala Salvation Front isn't strong enough to take on al-Qaida by itself. But the intelligence its members provide could prove invaluable to our troops.

You haven't heard of the Anbar Salvation Council? Maybe that's because our news media have tended to treat good news from Iraq as no news. When Thomas Ricks of The Washington Post reported last September that a senior Marine intelligence officer thought Anbar province had been "lost politically," his story attracted enormous attention from his fellow journalists. Google lists 789,000 references to that one story.

The Anbar Salvation Council, a coalition of 41 Sunni tribes under the leadership of Sheik Abdul Sattar al-Rishawi, has in very short order reversed that situation (if it were ever as dire as Col. Pete Devlin imagined). Al-Qaida has been all but driven out of Iraq's "Wild West." But Google lists only 114,000 mentions of the Anbar Salvation Council. (Paris Hilton has nearly 76 million mentions.)

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Perhaps Ricks needs to be introduced tot he Anbar Salvation Council. Actually he does know about it, but now he is writing stories about still not having enough troops to fight the war in Iraq. He does that without ever mentioning the Clinton's disastrous cuts in the US military in the 90's. Ricks is a pessimist as shown by the title of his book about the war Fiasco. While his counterpart at the NY Times has actively been covering this offensive Ricks appears to be covering the Washington front where the war is actually in much more trouble than it is in Iraq.