As we affectionately know him, M,a.S. was captured by a U.S. force early on in the festivities.

I went to the Pre-command course in 2007 with the former Bn Cdr (then COL ready to command BDE) whose scouts captured him. They captured him with the assistance of a disaffected relative.

According to my classmate he received a direct phone call ass-chewing from Dirty Sanchez himself, for being an independent operator. M.a.S was quickly released. The disaffected relative was then not forthcoming with any further tips, assuming he still lives.

At some point in time we needed to turn this mess over to the Iraqis. I think it's rather egotistical to assume that we could "influence" Iraq "from the top down" to look like we wanted it to. The real solution to the reconciliation, assuming there will be one, has to come from the Iraqis. We can assist with it, but our hand cannot be the one that guides the entire process. The people of Iraq won't fully commit to anything until they want it. Regardless of what we think the best solution is, it takes implementation on the part of the GoI.

Frankly, i'm glad that the Iraqis stonewalled us on the process. It shows a choice instead of blindly following the invading/occupying power.

Every time you look at their political process and cry to the heavens about how inefficient / corrupt / sectarian / stupid it is, think about how we appear to the rest of the world. The 2000 presidential election came across looking anything but above board, regardless of the outcome. Our political climate reeks of the same type of divisive rhetoric that can lead to ethno-sectarian strife in Iraq. We can't exactly use our own process as an example of "how to do it right."

I think in the end we have to trust the Iraqis. The training wheels are off. The sooner we removed ourselves from the process, the sooner a long-lasting solution that has Iraqi buy-in can be found.

The Surge was announced in January 2007, the designated troops started deploying that Spring. Sadr announced his ceasefire in August 2007. Therefore, based on the timeline the Surge being designed to build on the two earlier breaks I referred to can not include the Sadrist ceasefire. Did that help? Sure. Was it the result of the Surge? Iranian influence? Something else? I sure don't know. Cow Cookie is correct that they stopped when he said stop (by and large: aa number of these guys at local level were basically just organized criminals and just moved into what we would think of as organized crime - violence, security vig, trying to control local councils for profit). I also agree with Walking Wounded that, to some extent, some of these groups ran together. The social connections that seem clear to us, as in we see them, but may not understand them, may have been fluid for the Iraqis depending on what they were doing and when. Additionally, I'm certainly not advocating extending our stay or putting more troops back in, and I'm not sure how one could derive that from something I've written. The tragic reality is that we have a huge moral debt to the Iraqis, that trying to pay it would likely make things worse, and that both of those may not be reconcilable with our national interests. I've argued here and at several other places that no matter what we do, once we're gone the Iraqis will decide, and likely very violently, how they want to order their affairs. Finally, I'm there's no self fulfillment here. We adopted a policy to conduct a third party counterinsurgency strategy, that strategy has clearly defined end states. Societal element to societal element reconciliation is one of them, societal element to government is another. As has been repeatedly discussed, sometimes here, sometimes in other places, 3rd Party COIN is exceedingly hard to do and rarely works or at least works in a way that anyone can declare victory. Given the problem sets faced in Iraq in 2007, the question is: if we stay what gets us closed to the effect that the policy makers want to achieve or that needs to be achieved? If withdrawal is off the table, and it was, then applying the concepts of COIN was determined to be the best way forward. More books than Mr. Ricks could write could contain the things that were done that handicapped us, made it harder to achieve the proscribed end states, and has both prolonged the suffering of the Iraqi people while keeping our personnel at risk, but the one that stands out to me is decision that we would not, in accordance with our responsibilities as an occupying power under UN mandate, fix the power grid. I know we did make some efforts. And I know that Iraqis themselves targeted their own infrastructure projects. But if we fixed the power, even working through Iraqi interlocutors, that would have allowed us to get the water flowing. This would have allowed for a restart of large scale agriculture, which would have either kept people at home or drawn them back, making them unavailable for recruitment to be part of the insurgency. The decision that the Iraqis would do this, over a ten year period, and do so by privatizing their electrical infrastructure making it for profit, instead of a public good, is going go haunt Iraq and us for years.

Never type comments on one's iPad - too many fat finger typos!!!!