At PJM, Richard Miniter identifies who benefits from the “shooting Iraqi civilians” and other scandal stories suddenly appearing in profusion about the private security contractor Blackwater USA.

Movements of key CIA station personnel in Baghdad—along with most State department diplomats and teams building police stations and schools—have been frozen for the second day in a row, according to a State department source who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Essentially, the CIA, State department and government contractors are stuck inside the International Zone, also known as “the Green Zone,” in Central Baghdad. Even travel inside that walled enclave is somewhat restricted.

Pajamas Media is the first to report that the CIA station is all but motionless—as meetings with informants and Iraqi government officials have been hastily cancelled.

What caused the shut down? Following a firefight between Iraqi insurgents and a Blackwater USA protection detail on Sunday (12:08 PM Baghdad time), Iraqi officials suspended the operating license of the North Carolina-based government contractor. While the Iraqi government is yet to hold a formal hearing on the matter, Blackwater and all it protects remain frozen.

“By jamming up Blackwater, they shut down the movements of the embassy and the [CIA] station,” a State department source told Pajamas Media. He is not cleared to talk to the press.

Blackwater provides Personnel Security Details—or PSDs—for most CIA, State department, and U.S. Agency of International Development officers. In addition, Blackwater’s special-forces veterans guard many of the Provincial Reconstruction Teams—or PRTs—that build schools, clinics, police and fire stations and other structures that house essential Iraqi government services. Work on these vital “hearts and minds” projects has all but stopped across Iraq.

The State department has long insisted on using Blackwater and other private security firms so that its convoys and legations would not be controlled by the Defense department. …

At least eight Iraqis are reported dead after the Sunday shoot out and some press reports refer to the local casualties as “civilians.”

“Initial press accounts were inaccurate,” said Blackwater USA spokeswoman Anne Tyrell. “The ‘civilians’ reportedly fired upon by Blackwater professionals were in fact armed enemies and Blackwater personnel returned defensive fire. Blackwater regrets any loss of life but this convoy was violently attacked by armed insurgents, not civilians, and our people did their job to defend human life.”

“Blackwater professionals heroically defended American lives in a war zone on Sunday and Blackwater will cooperate with any inquiry into this matter.”

It’s well known in Iraq that dead insurgents become “civilians” as soon as their comrades carry away their AK-47s and spare magazines. Captured al Qaeda manuals detail how militants should use deaths as a propaganda tool. …

By apparently lifting Blackwater’s license, the democratically elected Iraq government may stall the forward progress created by the Gen. Petraeus’ surge and change in counterinsurgency tactics.

Indeed, some contend that the actions of Iraq’s Ministry of Interior, which supervises police and some intelligence functions, may be influenced by insurgents or even by Iran.

The staffing and internal rules of the Interior ministry were set up by Biyat Jabr, an affable and charming Shia Muslim who once worked for Saddam Hussein. (He was never a member of the Ba’ath party and thus survived de-Ba’athification with ease.)

Jabr is widely believed to be in the pay of Iranian intelligence services, although U.S. officials caution that there is no firm evidence of this charge. Jabr left the ministry in August 2006 and is now Finance Minister, but before he exited he salted the ranks with people loyal to Iran and hostile to the U.S. “Innocents dying [in the Sunday gun battle with Blackwater] is just a pretext,” the same State department source said.

Enemies of the U.S. inside the Interior ministry have been looking to shut down Blackwater for some time. …

Both the State department and the Congress have signaled that investigations in to Blackwater will begin soon.

The State department hopes to shift blame onto Blackwater’s low-level “trigger pullers,” says the State department source, while Rep. Henry Waxman’s committee is expected to target senior executives at Blackwater and top Bush Administration officials. A perfect storm is set to roil Blackwater.

If Blackwater and other private contractors are shut out of Iraq, Democrats in Congress and Iranian intelligence operatives may have stumbled on a way to end the Iraq War—less than a week after Gen. Petraeus testified that the U.S. is turning the corner.

And sure enough, just as Miniter predicted, here comes the Associated Press with another headline, reading Feds target Blackwater in weapons probe:

Federal prosecutors are investigating whether employees of the private security firm Blackwater USA illegally smuggled into Iraq weapons that may have been sold on the black market and ended up in the hands of a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, officials said Friday.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Raleigh, N.C., is handling the investigation with help from Pentagon and State Department auditors, who have concluded there is enough evidence to file charges, the officials told The Associated Press. …

In the United States, officials in Washington said the smuggling investigation grew from internal Pentagon and State Department inquiries into U.S. weapons that had gone missing in Iraq. It gained steam after Turkish authorities protested to the U.S. in July that they had seized American arms from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, rebels. …

The North Carolina investigation was first brought to light by State Department Inspector General Howard Krongard, who mentioned it, perhaps inadvertently, this week while denying he had improperly blocked fraud and corruption probes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Krongard was accused in a letter by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, of politically motivated malfeasance, including refusing to cooperate with an investigation into alleged weapons smuggling by a large, unidentified State Department contractor.

Daily Kos cites a poll of 1461 Iraqis taken by a “respected British marketing research firm” which proves the US is responsible for the violent deaths of more than a million Iraqis so far.

And Ray Drake, at Davids Medienkritik, cites German media reports of numbers of US anti-war demonstrators.

ARD Tagesschau, SZ and SPIEGEL ONLINE – “4,000 to 6,000” anti-war demonstrators
ZDF and Die Zeit – “About 10,000” anti-war demonstrators
TAZ – “Tens-of-thousands” of anti-war demonstrators
Die Welt – “50,000 anti-war demonstrators”
Die Presse (Austrian media site) – “Around 100,000 Americans marched against the war…”

Do I hear 200,000? 500,000? 1,000,000 anti-war demonstrators? Going once – going twice – sold!

Bill Roggio has the story.

On September 5, Coalition forces announced the capture of “a highly-sought individual suspected of being an Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps-Qods Force (more commonly spelled “Quds,” as in “al Quds,” i.e. Jerusalem) (IRGC-QF) affiliate” during a raid in Karbala.

The Special Groups agent, who has not been identified, is “suspected of coordinating with high-level IRGC-QF officers for the transportation of multiple Iraqis to Iran for terrorist training at IRGC-QF training camps.” The suspect also serves as a logistical operative and “is closely linked to individuals at the highest levels of the IRGC-QF. Coalition forces are still assessing his possible connection to the Special Groups.” Documents, photographs, communications equipment, and computers were found during the raid on his home.

Information obtained from this latest raid likely will shed more light on the leadership and organization of the Special Groups, the identity of their Iranian Qods Force handlers, and their current plans in Iraq.

Daryl Cagle, MSNBC.com

Robert Tracinski argue that comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam are a losing argument for the Left.

America’s defeat in Vietnam, for example, was seemingly a triumph for the anti-war left, which had long proclaimed the war to be unwinnable quagmire. Yet the years following that defeat–the era of American retreat and “national malaise”–proved so traumatic that the American people have never wanted to repeat them. Thus, what the anti-war radicals regarded as a vindication ended up discrediting the left on foreign policy for a generation. You could say that they won the political battle over the war–but they lost the peace.

Today, we may be seeing the final chapter of that process. The left is losing the Vietnam War itself–losing Vietnam, that is, as a rhetorical high ground from which to pillory any advocate of vigorous American military action overseas.

Read the whole thing.

Who knows? Hillary may just be their new Jimmy Carter, too.

Amy Proctor (via Scott Malensik) offers this August 2005 video from Iraqi television featuring captured Al Qaeda terrorist Ramzi Hashem Abed testifying about his group’s repulsive and blood-curdling activities. (The interrogator indignantly asks him if he thinks kidnapping, raping, and then murdering college students is really jihad.)

What is most significant though is Abed’s frank account of being part of the radical Islamist Ansar al Islam group, connected with Al Qaeda, which seized several Kurdish villages near Halabja and imposed Sharia rule in 2001. Their training area was in Falluja, he recalls, in the time of the former Iraqi regime.

9:49 video

Wesley Pruden admires the consternation of the democrats at the turning of the tide in Iraq.

It’s not easy to pimp surrender, but some of our congressional and media worthies are giving it their best shot.

It won’t be easy. Nobody but the loons think quitters, fakers, surrender monkeys and pessimists of various stripes are good custodians of the national interests, and the men and women who read the newspapers and magazines and watch the television newscasts are smarter than the men and women who write and preen for them. Americans are fed up with the Iraq war not because they think resisting jihad is wrong, but because they think the leaders at the top may not necessarily be serious about winning without apology. Anthony McAuliffe, who answered the German demand for surrender at Bastogne with “nuts” (if not something a little saltier), is the kind of general Americans admire most.

The risks for Democratic doom-criers are becoming evident. The accumulating evidence of progress, little by little, is changing public opinion. Media opinion will follow, slowly as always, and the sluggard notabilities of press and screen will be tugged — “kicking and screaming,” as the liberals once said of conservatives — into reality. The Democrats in Congress, like the embittered losers on the left, will be left behind on the other side of the famous bridge to the 21st century.

Cautious optimism is reflected in curious places. “The new U.S. military strategy in Iraq, unveiled six months ago to little acclaim, is working,” the Associated Press — no particular friend of George W. Bush — reports. The usual caveats follow: “It’s a phase with fresh promise yet the same old worry: Iraq may be too fractured to make whole.” And this: the U.S. military “cannot guarantee victory.” And this: “… it is far from certain that [the Iraqis] are capable of putting this shattered country together again.” American commanders are “clinging to a hope.” And “there is no magic formula for success.” Duh.

Nevertheless and grudging or not, things are reported to be better than they used to be, and seem to be getting a little better every day. It’s enough to make a partisan Democrat weep. Some are. Nancy Boyda of Kansas, a freshman in the House, was so unnerved by good news from the front that she stalked out of a committee hearing when a retired general described developments in Iraq as encouraging. Good news like that, she said, only “further divides the country.” Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, the Democratic majority House whip, was even more revealing: If things improve in Iraq, that would be “a real problem for us.”

Fear began to creep into the Democratic consciousness a fortnight or so ago, replacing the happy confidence that America was taking the licking that would doom Republicans next year.

Read the whole thing.

An Army Ranger Sergeant First Class, who has served 21 months in Iraq, while home on a two week leave, pleads for the US public’s support to let him finish his job on a call to the Neal Boortz show. The video was produced by Noodlehead Studios and SaveTheSoldiers.Com.

7:32 video

Marc Sheppard observes that good news concerning the success of US operations in Iraq and the continuation of British support under new Prime Minister Gordon Brown has made it a bad week for the democrat anti-war left, but the democrats and their media allies are fighting back.

Warfare is the Way of deception – Sun Tzu

The left’s anti-war forces sustained heavy casualties earlier this week. And, judging from both strategy shifts and painful screams heard throughout the liberal blogosphere, many of the fallen were high value propaganda targets.

It’s no secret that Democratic strategists see failure in Iraq as a blood-soaked red carpet leading them to the White House next year. So much so that even before the president officially announced the initial 20,000 troop surge in January, opposition party leaders were scrambling to denounce it as a doomed and desperate last-gasp effort to save a failing policy. …

(various positive news)

..the now fully implemented surge is working to expectation and the misinformed contrarians were wrong.

No problem – Dems and the MSM will simply toggle between denying and ignoring that fact. Just as they’ve denied the nature of Al Qaeda in Iraq and ignored its recent attempts to use chemical weapons against Iraqi civilians. Ditto requests for their plan to prevent the untold civilian casualties of anti-war associated with cutting and running, which may now include a repeat of what happened to the Kurds of Halabja.

Sure enough — with hopes of an unfavorable review quickly fading, a new stratagem has arisen, with anti-war disinformation brigades launching a surge of their own. Suddenly no longer concerned with military matters, today we are being barraged with statements like those from ABC News (“In the critical, political arena, the picture is bleak”) or from Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE), who in April declared “that the troop surge plan in Iraq has failed,” yet today quipped:

“We’ve made some progress in the surge, we’ve made some military progress. But I think [Petraeus will] be honest enough to say we’ve made no political progress.”

As is often said of its counterpart, it’s becoming abundantly clear that truth is the first casualty of anti-war.

Read the whole thing.

Tony Blankley compares the minor setbacks in Iraq with the major setbacks early in the Second World War (and the behavior of the British Opposition then with that of the American defeatists of today). As in 1942, changes in military leadership and growing experience in dealing with the enemy may in 2007 be producing a major change in momentum.

On June 25, the following resolution was tabled in the House:

“That this House, while paying tribute to the heroism and endurance of the Armed Forces, in circumstances of exceptional difficulty, has no confidence in the central direction of the war.”

That would be June 25, 1942. The House would be the House of Commons in London, England. And the government in which no confidence was expressed was that of Winston Churchill.

Almost three years into World War II, repeated military failures had induced considerable war fatigue in Britain. In February 1942, Singapore fell to the Japanese with 25,000 British troops being taken prisoner. In March, Rangoon fell. This was vastly damaging to Churchill’s prestige in Washington as Rangoon was the only port through which aid could be shipped to China’s Chiang Kai-shek — a very high priority for the United States in Asia.

In April, the Japanese Navy drove the Royal Navy all the way back to East Africa and shelled the British Indian coastal cities.

Then on June 21, 1942, Tobruk in North Africa fell to Gen. Rommel, with 33,000 British prisoners taken and the Suez Canal (Britain’s lifeline to her Asian empire and oil) threatened.

A week later, Churchill struggled to win that vote of no confidence. But shrewd political observers in London at the time (very much including Churchill himself) believed he was one more lost battle away from being removed from office — or at best stripped of his Minister of Defense cabinet powers and rendered a mere figurehead leader.

But during those months Churchill had been busy firing or re-assigning the generals who were not bringing victories: including Gens. Wavell, Dill, Auchinleck, Ritchie, Norrie, Brooke-Popham, Messervy and Corbett — among others.

Finally he found a general who could win — Bernard Law Montgomery. And at the second battle of El Alamein in October and November 1942, Montgomery beat Rommel and started the drive west across the rim of Africa — finally driving Rommel and his Afrika Corp clear off the continent. Both for Churchills’ government and the eventual victory in WWII, El Alamein was the “hinge of fate.” As Chuchill said: “Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein we never had a defeat.”

I wonder whether, perhaps, in Gen. Petraeus President Bush has finally found his Gen. Montgomery. And whether Petraeus’s new strategy and success at beating al Qaeda in Iraq and growing success against the Mahdi Army — may be his El Alamein.

Wars are curious things. Certainly, as President Bush and many of his supporters have cruelly learned, victories cannot reliably be predicted. But as Sen. Harry Reid, the congressional Democrats (and a growing number of Republicans) may soon learn — neither can one reliably predict defeat.

Of course, there are vast differences between WWII and the current Iraq Theatre of the War on Terror (ITWOT). For one thing, in 1942, the British Parliamentarians were not proposing bringing the British troops home and surrendering to Hitler and the Japanese. They merely thought another leader (perhaps Sir Stafford Cripps) might better lead Britain to victory.

Were they more patriotic than the current defeatists in Washington? Perhaps. Or perhaps it was just that they understood (at least by that terrible summer of 1942) that for England, it was victory or death — while for many of the Washington defeatists in this dismal summer of ’07 they are under the delusion that America in all its might and glory can simply surrender to al Qaeda without potentially mortal consequences. …

So this week’s New York Times article by Brookings Institute experts arguing that we may yet be able to win the war has sent a tidal wave of hope through the pro-war camp and a chill down the backs of the Democratic Party defeatist. If it’s true, the hinge of fate unexpectedly may be swinging — knocking over many in its great arc.

Read the whole thing.

Thomas Joscelyn, in the Weekly Standard, refutes the recent democratic justification for defeatism: the claim that “Iraq is the wrong battlefield.”

Those cowards and defeatists would be just as unhappy, and just as eager to press for withdrawal, if the US invaded Waziristan. They just feel safe pointing to it as an alternative, because they feel certain that no US administration would invade Pakistan.

The leading Democratic presidential contenders have voiced a new conventional wisdom in recent weeks: The war in Iraq has little or nothing to do with defeating al Qaeda. Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have embraced this view, as has the New York Times. It is dangerously wrong. …

Just last week, the summary of a new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) representing the consensus of the U.S. intelligence community was released. It states that the organization “Al Qaeda in Iraq” is the terror network’s “most visible and capable affiliate.” Al Qaeda’s leadership still desires to strike the U.S. homeland and “will probably seek to leverage the contacts and capabilities of Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI)” to do so. “In addition,” the intelligence estimate notes, al Qaeda relies on Al Qaeda in Iraq to “energize the broader Sunni extremist community, raise resources, and to recruit and indoctrinate operatives, including for Homeland attacks.”

These judgments are obviously inconsistent with Obama’s belief that America is fighting on the “wrong battlefield.” But the judgments of the intelligence community have been wrong before–witness the October 2002 NIE on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. So we should be wary of taking this latest pronouncement at face value.

The NIE’s conclusions are, however, supported by a source that cannot be ignored: al Qaeda’s two principal leaders. Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri have repeatedly called Iraq the “front line” in their war against Western civilization. Indeed, a review of their statements–readily accessible in translation in the anthologies edited by Bruce Lawrence (Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden) and Laura Mans field (His Own Words: Translations and Analysis of the Writings of Dr. Ayman Al Zawahiri) and from other public sources–confirms that they have made Iraq their fight. …

Bin Laden and Zawahiri’s own words tell us that the American project in Iraq jeopardizes everything their group stands for: These two top leaders of al Qaeda have promised the people of the Middle East that al Qaeda will protect Muslim soil from the “Crusader-Zionist” invaders, even if the region’s rulers will not, and even if doing so meant cooperating with the “apostate” Saddam.

Zawahiri believes that Iraq is al Qaeda’s best opportunity for establishing a true Islamist state in the heart of the Middle East. Democracy does not belong in the region, the two men say, and only an Islamic government based on sharia law is acceptable in Iraq. The mujahedeen will drive the Americans out of Iraq using the same tactics they used to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan. America’s leaders and soldiers are weak, al Qaeda says. They are looking for a way to run from the fight in Iraq, and they will do so, bin Laden exults, while the “whole world is watching.”

The whole world, that is, except the leading Democratic candidates for president.

Read the whole thing.

Michael Totten reports directly from the unbearable fiasco of US military operations in unwinnable Iraq.

82nd Airborne’s Lieutenant William H. Lord from Foxborough, Massachusetts, prepared his company for a dismounted foot patrol in the Graya’at neighborhood of Northern Baghdad’s predominantly Sunni Arab district of Adhamiyah. …

The battalion I’m embedded with here in Baghdad hasn’t suffered a single casualty – not even one soldier wounded – since they arrived in the Red Zone in January. The surge in this part of the city could not possibly be going better than it already is. Most of Graya’at’s insurgents and terrorists who haven’t yet fled are either captured, dormant, or dead. …

Everyone was friendly. No one shot at us or even looked at us funny. Infrastructure problems, not security, were the biggest concerns at the moment. I felt like I was in Iraqi Kurdistan – where the war is already over – not in Baghdad.

It was an edgy “Kurdistan,” though. Every now and then someone drove down the street in a vehicle. If any military-aged males (MAMs as the Army guys call them) were in the car, the soldiers stopped it and made everybody get out. The vehicle and the men were then searched.

Read the whole thing.

J.R Dunn describes the situation at American Thinker:

It’s now quite clear how the results of the surge will be dealt with by domestic opponents of the Iraq war.

They’re going to be ignored. …

Virtually no media source or Democratic politician (and not a few Republicans, led by Richard “I can always backtrack” Lugar) is willing to admit that the situation on the ground has changed dramatically over the past three months. Coalition efforts have undergone a remarkable reversal of fortune, a near-textbook example as to how an effective strategy can overcome what appear to be overwhelming drawbacks.

Anbar is close to being secured, thanks to the long-ridiculed strategy of recruiting local sheiks. A capsule history of war coverage could be put together from stories on this topic alone – beginning with sneers, moving on to “evidence” that it would never work, to the puzzled pieces of the past few months admitting that something was happening, and finally the recent stories expressing concern that the central government might be “offended” by the attention being paid former Sunni rebels. (Try to find another story in the legacy media worrying about the feelings of the Iraqi government.) What you will not find is any mention of the easily-grasped fact that Anbar acts as a blueprint for the rest of the country. If the process works there, it will work elsewhere. If it works in other areas, that means the destruction of the Jihadis in detail.

Nor is that all. Diyala province, promoted in media as the “new Al-Queda stronghold” appears to have become a death-trap. The Jihadis can neither defend it nor abandon it. The Coalition understood that Diyala was where the Jihadis would flee when the heat came down in Baghdad, and they were ready for them. A major element of surge strategy – and one reason why the extra infantry brigades were needed – is to pressure Jihadis constantly in all their sanctuaries, allowing them no time to rest or regroup.

A blizzard of operations is occurring throughout central Iraq under the overall code-name Phantom Thunder, the largest operation since the original invasion. It is open-ended, and will continue as long as necessary. Current ancillary operations include Arrowhead Ripper, which is securing the city of Baqubah in Diyala province. Operation Alljah is methodically clearing out every last neighborhood in Fallujah. In Babil province, southeast of Baghdad, operations Marne Torch and Commando Eagle are underway. (As this was being written, yet another spinoff operation, Marne Avalanche, began in Northern Babil.)

The Coalition has left the treadmill in which one step of progress seemed to unavoidably lead to two steps back. It requires some time to discover the proper strategy in any war. A cursory glance at 1943 would have given the impression of disaster. Kasserine, in which the German Wehrmacht nearly split Allied forces in Tunisia and sent American GIs running. Tarawa, where over 1,600 U.S. Marines died on a sunny afternoon thanks to U.S. Navy overconfidence. Salerno, where the Allied landing force was very nearly pushed back into the sea. But all these incidents, as bitter as they may have been, were necessary to develop the proper techniques that led to the triumphs of 1944 and 1945.

Someday, 2006 may be seen as Iraq’s 1943. It appears that Gen. David Petreaus has discovered the correct strategy for Iraq: engaging the Jihadis all over the map as close to simultaneously as possible. Keeping them on the run constantly, giving them no place to stand, rest or refit. Increasing operational tempo to an extent that they cannot match (“Getting inside their decision cycle”, as the 4th generation warfare school would call it), leaving them harried, uncertain, and apt to make mistakes.

Read the whole thing.