IRAQ: A Tale Of Two Bloggers

Summing up his recent focus on "surge blogging" The Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum writes:

Anbar is good news despite the long-term risk of arming Sunni tribal leaders. Petraeus seems to be doing a good job on the counterinsurgency front (though it's frankly hard to say how much of this is good PR based on a limited number of success stories and how much is genuine widespread progress). And it's possible that violence is down in Baghdad, though I'd rate the odds of that at no more than 50-50. ... On the downside, most of the evidence suggests that violence is following seasonal patterns and is going up, not down. The insurgency seems to be getting worse in the north. Civil war is breaking out in the south. ... The conventional wisdom this summer, after a steady round of dog-and-pony shows from the military, says that although political progress in Iraq is nil (or even in reverse), at least we're finally making some tactical progress on the security front. And maybe we are. But I'm trying to be as honest as I can be here, and it looks to me like the balance of the evidence suggests that this is more hype than reality. As near as I can tell, we're not making much progress on either front.

From Iraq, RedState's Jeff Emanuel reports:

As one of the very few journalists (out of the hundreds who come here) who actually spends time out on the front lines, seeing with my own eyes the gunshots, the IEDs, the school openings, the public clinics, the Concerned Citizens meetings, etc., etc. -- rather than simply sitting in safety and reporting hearsay -- I have personally seen evidence that the 'Surge' is working militarily. ... I have also seen, though, how broken and splintered this country really is, and what a difficult -- and perhaps impossible -- task it is to rebuild it in a way that accomplishes the US's goal of having a stable ally in the war on terror. ... In my opinion, though, it is far too soon to close the books on the idea of Iraq -- both because of the growing portion of the population which does want peace and stability (and is willing to fight for it), and because, like it or not -- and regardless of when or why it came to be so -- a central front in the War on Terror, against al Qaeda and other extremists, is, in fact, Iraq.