The combat news from Samarra looks good.
The political news, on the other hand, doesn’t look so good, and counterinsurgency is as much a political activity as it is a military one.
The President of Iraq condemned urban bombing as “collective punishment.”
(The New York Post buries the opinion of the President of the supposedly sovereign nation of Iraq about attacks by U.S. forces on an Iraqi city under “other developments.” Does anyone take seriously the fiction that the occupation has ended and that the Iraqis are now in charge of their own country?)
Presumably Yawar’s comments are political posturing intended for domestic consumption. If he’s doing anything about it, he doesn’t say so.
But the fact that the man installed under our supervision as the President of Iraq thinks it good political strategy to criticize our military actions, and in particular to compare them to Israeli tactics in the West Bank, suggests that we’re not very popular in Iraq right now.