Quote Originally Posted by jcustis View Post
...One of the few positive articles I've seen written about Al Anbar was in an Oct or Nov Economist magazine IIRC, detailing the exploits of a special forces team that swooped into Ar Rutbah in 2003 and started to get governance back on its feet. The downside is that the writer should have visited Ar Rutbah anytime in the last two years. He'd have quickly decided to scrap the article, as Rutbah quickly turned to crap, through no fault of the 82d Airborne and Marine units that have rotated through there...
It was Foreign Policy, not The Economist, the Nov/Dec 05 issue:

The Mayor of Ar Rutbah
Amid the chaos in Iraq, one company of U.S. Special Forces achieved what others have not: a functioning democracy. How? By relying on common sense, the trust of Iraqis, and recollections from Political Science 101. Now, their commander reveals the gritty reality about nation-building in Iraq, from the ground up...