The more I hear from Kimberly Dozier of CBS, the more impressed I am. This is from her commencement address at Wellesley College. She is talking about being hit by a car bomb a few years ago in Baghdad:

Now I was lying there on the ground, didn't know what was wrong with me. I'd lost most of my blood, I had shrapnel to the brain, both eardrums were blown out, both femurs shattered and there was burning shrapnel studded in my legs from my hips to my ankles.

Now they say your true nature is revealed at a time like that. I immediately started alternately asking questions... and then a bit later, bossing my poor besieged rescuers around. I'm O positive. I have extra bandages. They are right here. Do you need them? You don't need them. Is my helmet on? If my helmet is not on, I think you should put my helmet on because I can hear some ammunition burning off and that's not good if it hits me. The poor guy is trying to put tourniquets on me and probably thinking, Lady, that is the least of your problems....

I had to do physiotherapy. Now because they hammered titanium rods through my legs, and I had a head wound. Some bizarre things happen with  these injuries. Bones overheal. My bones were overhealing with like flakes of coral bone that were going into my joints and fusing them. There was one way to fix this, otherwise they would fuse and I would walk like a peg leg for the rest of my life. I had to pick up my legs, and crack the knees, and break the flakes of bone. They would have to give me extra painkillers and it still hurt like hell. You would scream through gritted teeth. They had to lock mom in the waiting room, behind two closed fire doors, to allow this to take place.

My dad, meanwhile, knew this had to be done, would stand next to me, hold my hand and listen to me scream. Both of them are just absolute love, just different ways of expressing it."

A lot of people have suffered similar agonies in recent years, but Kim does a good job of capturing it.

PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/Getty Images

 

If reporters commanded rifle companies, the results would not be good. (Remember Bill Murray in Stripes?) That's the best way to understand American propaganda efforts in Iraq, with newspapers run by soldiers and bureaucrats. Take a gander at this summary over the weekend by the Washington Post's estimable Ernesto Londono:

Baghdad Now is not labeled as a U.S. military publication, although the military acknowledges it is produced by an Army psychological operations unit and distributed for free by soldiers. Piles of it are left at entrances to the Green Zone for passersby to pick up.

The headlines in a recent edition paid homage to a newly promoted police chief in Baghdad, reported that the implementation of a security agreement between Iraq and the United States is going swimmingly, and highlighted efforts at the Interior Ministry to root out corruption. A front-page ad showed Iraqis marching down a street, apparently protesting. Under the image was the statement: "The security forces protect your right to demonstrate peacefully."

Another edition included a cartoon showing a maimed insurgent leaving Iraq as a smiling refugee returns.

"This is so wrong," Aajeely said with a chuckle. "The people in charge of this are not professional journalists.

"They do it the same way the prior regime did its newspapers," he added, referring to publications that hewed to the narrative Saddam Hussein wanted to push.

A U.S. Army officer in Baghdad, speaking on the condition of anonymity so he could express criticism of the product, said the Iraqi soldiers at his outpost mock the publication and are more interested in the editorially independent Department of Defense newspaper, Stars and Stripes, and in the magazines soldiers get in the mail.

"They say it's childish," the officer said. "Baghdad Now makes a good fuel source at the Iraqi checkpoints."

The new issue of the Air Force's Strategic Studies Quarterly contains an unfortunate article on Iranian support for Iraqi Shiite militias. I turned to it eagerly, because this is a subject that interests me, in part because I think the Iranian effort in Iraq has been a model of a high-impact, low-profile training and advisory mission. I've been kind of stewing about it ever since I was in a convoy near Najaf in 2004 that I now believe was tracked and attacked by Iranian special operators. One soldier died and another was wounded.

But as I read, it pretty quickly became apparent to me that the author had nothing to say. Even so, I slogged on, and finally I got to this breathtaking conclusion: 

There are no easy choices, and the road ahead is perilous and uncertain. However, in this high-stakes security environment, America cannot afford to get this wrong and must pursue a thoughtful, purposeful policy guided by theory, history and pragmatic common sense."

Stop the presses! I think that paragraph-or rather, that car crash of clichés -- could apply to just about any foreign policy question any nation at war ever has faced. I mean, when is the road ahead ever safe and certain? And can you imagine calling for a thoughtless strategy unguided by history? (I know, I know -- we already tried that in Iraq in 2003.) 

As a taxpayer, I'd like my money back. And I sentence this writer to a remedial reading of George Orwell's great essay on "Politics and the English Language," which makes the point that slovenly language leads to foolish thinking.

AHMAD AL-RUBAYE/AFP/Getty Images

Over the weekend I was reading from a forthcoming book that has a section detailing the decline of security in Mosul in 2004, after then-Maj. Gen. David Petraeus packed up and left with the 101st Airborne, turning northern Iraq over to a much smaller replacement force. Over the course of several months, deals Petraeus had cut began to fall apart, and Iraqis he had brought on board were assassinated. These days the city is one of the most troubled in Iraq.

So I began to wonder: Is what we are seeing in Iraq now is a larger and slower version of those events? That is, the deals that Petraeus patched together as the top commander in Iraq in 2007-08 have begun unwinding slowly, and the momentum promises to accelerate with the sharp decline in U.S. troop levels scheduled for early next year.  

I asked a senior officer about this, and he responded:

I don't think that's what we're seeing, though there certainly are plenty of challenges facing Iraq -- among them continuation of agreements Iraqi leaders have made about taking care of Sons of Iraq members, observing international conventions regarding the Mujahideen el Khalq, not inflaming tensions with the Kurdish Regional Government, a budget crunch (due to the fall in the price of oil), Sunni-Shia tensions, and intra-Shia competition, among others. By no means were all the agreements reached on Petraeus' watch (he left in early Sep 08, albeit to go to CENTCOM which still oversees Iraq), of course, and many are in the realm of political or diplomatic issues, vice military. Beyond that, and despite the periodic sensational attacks causing concern in recent months, the level of violence has remained at the low levels that have characterized the past 6 months -- between 10 and 15 attacks per day, on average, vice the 160 attacks per day at the height of the violence in June 2007. 

Looking back, Mosul actually hung together better than any other area of Iraq during the April 2004 "uprising," when the Iraqi forces elsewhere in the country collapsed in the face of Sunni insurgent and Shia militia violence. (Petraeus and the 101st Abn Div left Mosul in Feb 04, and the ICDC they trained did reasonably well in Apr 04.) Beyond that, most observers assess that the spiral downward in Mosul began with the assassination of the governor of the province at the end of June 2004, following which many of the Sunni members of the provincial council walked out over the process followed to select the next governor, obviously not something over which Petraeus had any influence. Over time, this led to an increase in Sunni rejection of the situation and support for the insurgency that undermined security to the point that the police collapsed in Mosul in the face of an attack by AQI intended to draw attention away from the ongoing operation to clear Fallujah in November 2004. 

Despite his first sentence, I don't think his observations really say that the pattern I am seeing is incorrect. 

ninniane/Flickr

On Memorial Day 2006, Kimberly Dozier, a reporter for CBS, was in a vehicle in Baghdad that was blown up by a car bomb. Parts of the car were embedded in her legs. Several people were killed.

Here is part of an e-mail she sent to some friends looking back on it from this Memorial Day. I am posting this with her permission.

. . . more than ever on this weekend every year, I am reminded that it's not about me--and that the effects of that one car bomb--one of five that day--continue.

Jennifer Funkhouser, Capt. Funkhouser's widow, will take her daughters Allison & Kaitlyn to visit their dad at the Sam Houston Cemetery in San Antonio.

The families of soundman James Brolan and cameraman Paul Douglas are cheering on a team from the CBS London bureau who are biking across Britain to raise money for groups like Reporters Without Borders.

One of the medics from that day, Izzy Flores, got a promotion and is back on his second tour, doing time in that garden spot of Mosul. I'll be glad when he's out of there.

The other medic from that day has just been chaptered out of the military, after being outed as a lesbian on her second tour, as an act of vengeance when she turned in a superior officer who was dealing drugs.

At least two of the Iowa National guardsman from that day report continuing symptoms of PTSD--haven't been in touch with them lately. I bring back bad memories for them.

Captain Funkhouser's PSD that day Justin Farrar is being chaptered out of the army for PTSD--that from members of his family who asked me to see if I could help. Maybe I could, but Justin won't write me back.

There were four other car bombs in Baghdad that day -- aimed at U.S. & Iraqi patrols and Iraqi civilians -- so how many other casualties went unremarked and unreported, except by their families (Iraqi and American) and/or their fellow troops?

A lot to think about. And that was just one single, rather unremarkable day in Iraq.

KD/CBS

The news this morning that three U.S. soldiers and 12 Iraqis were killed by a roadside bomb in Doura hit especially hard because at CNAS lately I have been writing an introduction to a paper of how security was improved in that south Baghdad neighborhood in 2007-2008. It is an inspiring study of how to bring safety to a beleaguered civilian population, which makes it all the more disheartening to see those improvements erode.

John Moore/Getty Images

Steve Biddle of CFR has a good piece analyzing likely scenarios in Iraq that concludes that, "On balance, paying the cost of a slower withdrawal, while expensive, may ultimately be the cheaper approach." I agree.

By coincidence, I read his comment yesterday just a few minutes after I read this one by B.H. Liddell Hart in Strategy, his classic on the indirect approach:

"In strategy, the longest way round is often the shortest way home."

It also reminds me of something Col. Bill Rapp, an aide to Gen. Petraeus, said to me in Baghdad, I think in late 2007:

"The violent way is the short way, and the peaceful way is the long way." 

Tom Waits's tune "The Long Way Home" could be the theme song of the  strategically minded counterinsurgent.

I've got one thought here: This reminds me of how Gen. Casey got fired as the commander in Iraq. I think Petraeus and Gates are behind this, and the message is: Bigger changes are coming in the war than you think.