If we want to take Iraq, and Al Anbar seriously, gloom and doom and be what is required. I wouldn't want to see the argument of "all is lost", but at least a pessimistic appraisal of what lies ahead. If it gets people (particularly policymakers) to sit up and take notice, then great.


Devlin offers a series of reasons for the situation, including a lack of U.S. and Iraqi troops, a problem that has dogged commanders since the fall of Baghdad more than three years ago, said people who have read it. These people said he reported that not only are military operations facing a stalemate, unable to extend and sustain security beyond the perimeters of their bases, but also local governments in the province have collapsed and the weak central government has almost no presence...
I personally don't know the issues of slant with either the Post or the Times, and frankly don't care, but none of this is new information unless you've been oblivious to the named operations and casualties that have taken place in Anbar.

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.

I'm curious to know if policy-makers have decided to accept a level of violence on the fringe (Anbar) to protect the center (Baghdad), because I think they have the risk calculations all wrong. If we lose Baghdad (though defining loss is squishy), we certainly lose Iraq and it would turn into pure anarchy. But if we lose Anbar (and terrible security is a reasonable index), there are secondary effects that we cannot ignore, because the center could implode as a result.