The security improvements in most neighborhoods are real. Days now pass without a car bomb, after a high of 44 in the city in February. The number of bodies appearing on Baghdad’s streets has plummeted to about 5 a day, from as many as 35 eight months ago, and suicide bombings across Iraq fell to 16 in October, half the number of last summer and down sharply from a recent peak of 59 in March, the American military says. As a result, for the first time in nearly two years, people are moving with freedom around much of this city. In more than 50 interviews across Baghdad, it became clear that while there were still no-go zones, more Iraqis now drive between Sunni and Shiite areas for work, shopping or school, a few even after dark. In the most stable neighborhoods of Baghdad, some secular women are also dressing as they wish. Wedding bands are playing in public again, and at a handful of once shuttered liquor stores customers now line up outside in a collective rebuke to religious vigilantes from the Shiite Mahdi Army. Iraqis are clearly surprised and relieved to see commerce and movement finally increase, five months after an extra 30,000 American troops arrived in the country. But the depth and sustainability of the changes remain open to question.
And here’s the Examiner‘s report on Northern Iraq:
Despite a decline in violence in Iraq, northern Iraq has become more violent than other regions as al-Qaida and other militants move there to avoid coalition operations elsewhere, the region’s top U.S. commander said. Army Maj. Gen. Mark P. Hertling on Monday said al-Qaida cells still operate in all the key cities in the north. “What you’re seeing is the enemy shifting,” Hertling told Pentagon reporters in a video conference from outside Tikrit in northern Iraq. Hertling said militants have been pushed east to his area from Anbar by the so-called Awakening movement, in which local tribes have allied with the coalition against al-Qaida. Others have been pushed north to his area from the Baghdad region, where this year’s U.S. troops escalation has made more operations possible. “The attacks are still much higher than I would like here in the north, but they are continuing to decrease in numbers and scale of attacks,” he said. Hertling said 1,830 roadside bombs were placed in his region in June, compared with 900 last month.
So violence is on the decline everywhere, even where insurgents are fleeing. But the left can’t cope with that story. Look at how Think Progress reports this in it’s morning news brief–buried beneath stories about Hurricane Katrina, a new report on hate crime statistics, and Senator Leahy’s collaboration with the Bush regime:
While the violence in Baghdad declines [link to the Times piece], “northern Iraq has become more violent than other regions as al-Qaida and other militants move there to avoid coalition operations elsewhere.” “What you’re seeing is the enemy shifting [link ot the Examiner],” Army Maj. Gen. Mark P. Hertling told reporters yesterday.
They make it sound like we’re playing whack-a-mole, but that’s not really what those articles say at all. What those articles say is that we’re finally winning in Iraq, that the lives of ordinary Iraqis are getting better, and that the surge has saved the lives of thousands of innocent people. Apparently that’s not a story the “reality-based community” is very comfortable with.
