While progress in Iraq has become unavoidable, some try harder to avoid it

AP/Fox News:

From this base (Patrol Base Murray) in insurgent country south of Baghdad, there are no doubts that the U.S. decision to pour 30,000 additional troops into the fight has had an effect.

Before the 3rd Infantry Division's 2nd Brigade arrived in mid-June, the area around Patrol Base Murray was known as the Triangle of Death — a safe haven for Al Qaeda in Iraq to ambush Shiites, launch mortar and rocket attacks into the Green Zone and rig car bombs, homicide vests and other weapons for use in the capital.

Today, commanders point to the sharp drop in Baghdad attacks — down in August to a quarter of what they had been, according to the top commander Gen. David Petraeus — as evidence of their effectiveness.

"Our job was to stop the flow of accelerants to Baghdad," Lt. Col. Ken Adgie, commander of the 1st Battalion, 30th Infantry Regiment, said Monday, referring to bombs, bullets and fighters that accelerate the conflict.

"Take a look. Have the number of incidents in Baghdad slowed? It's working," he said.

More than just adding more boots on the ground, Petraeus' strategy called for the establishment of smaller combat outposts like Patrol Base Murray to encourage soldiers to get to know the local population and get closer to the insurgency.

The base was built right on "Route Gnat" — the only paved road from the Arab Jabour area into Baghdad. Many of the dirt roads have been shut down, said Brig. Gen. Jim Huggins, the 3rd Division's operational commander for the region.

"It's allowed us to set up a blocking line to interdict the accelerants on the way in — explosives, suicide vests, even fighters — and that's being reflected in what we are seeing in Baghdad," he said.

"You can't always defend from the goal line."

...

While even the AP can see he logic and success of the surge, don't expect that from Sudarsan Raghaven of the Washington Post who proclaims the success in reopening a market in Baghdad "a Potemkin village of sorts," because the US "military hands out $2,500 grants to shop owners to open or improve their businesses." What would the Post call that kind of investment in New Orleans?

Worse, Raghaven calls the grass roots reconciliation process "working at cross-purposes with Iraq's elected Shiite-led government by financing onetime Sunni insurgents who say they now want to work with the Americans...."

This reporter needs to be getting additional support payments from the DNC for his partisan work instead of giving it away in the Post.

The award for false memories of Vietnam has to go to the Washington Posts Eugene Robinson who says among other things:

...

For the record, the illegal U.S. bombing of Cambodia destabilized that country and boosted the Khmer Rouge, who eventually took power and exterminated those "millions" in the "killing fields."...

...

Robinson gives no support for his statement that the bombing was illegal. If it was it was a pretty stupid law.

Just think about the fact that the bombing was targeting thousands of communist troops whose stated purpose was destabilizing and overthrowing the government of South Vietnam, yet Robinson makes the counterintuitive argument that to fight back against this force was destabilizing to Cambodia?

Does he really think they were invited into Cambodia to prop up the government? If so, then Cambodia is no longer a neutral country. It becomes a hostile country that is subject to attack. If they were not invited in, then they certainly were not there to stabilize the country. In the law of wars a neutral country must resist the sue of its territory for purposes of attacking a neighbor or it is no longer neutral.

From top to bottom, Robinson's argument about Cambodia is a crock. It is a crock used by liberals, as usual, to avoid responsibility for the consequences of the genocide caused by the "peace movement." You better believe they are already working on their spin for avoiding responsibility for genocide in Iraq if their strategy for defeat works.

Jules Crittenden also takes on the Potemkin journalism crowd. It is a must read.