…from Baghdad:

Still living in Baghdad, this family has not fled the community it lives in. Shia and Sunni live on both sides of the home.

Some people forget that the sectarian violence kicked off in 2005 as part a deliberate strategy by AQIZ. Too many people assume that Sunni and Shia in Iraq have been killing each other for centuries.

The war in Iraq is plagued by a Congress who lacks the information to cast a vote and a public who lacks the basic knowledge to take part in an opinion poll.

…Is there hope for Baghdad? Yes. The additional U.S. forces from the surge are already showing limited signs of success. They are not the signs quantified by London or D.C. think tanks.

Every Battalion Commander I talked with gave me the same metrics to measure success–Commerce, people returning to their homes, essential services, kids playing soccer in fields they haven’t played on in 2 years, professionalization of the police and security services.

Those are things that do not fit well in an index and things a person can only see on the ground by going back to the same areas of operation every few months.

Which is why I will be back in Dora and West Rasheed in a few months.