Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

The news, which was pretty much foreordained, could not have come as a shattering revelation to President Barack Obama’s administration, the Joint Chiefs of Staff  at the Department of Defense or former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who this year appears to be running for President of the United states. The story was prominently featured in Malta Today , but that was because the refugees from Benghazi in Libya were pouring into Malta. The Philippines   had already withdrawn from Benghazi. They were, according to a story buried on page A8 in the Hartford Courant , struggling “to evacuate about 13,000 nationals to Malta – this after “the beheaded remains of a Philippine national were found in Benghazi last week and a Philippine nurse was abducted and raped Wednesday," all signs that Islamic militants, as they are sometimes called by the U.S. media, were preparing to add Benghazi to their borderless Middle East Caliphate.

The good news probably will not make the front pages of the New York Times and its Connecticut derivatives. But weeks after the Times and other publications decided that the Mahdi Army had prevailed over Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki, the government of Iraq and the Saderists have reached an agreement, according to the most recent update on The Long War Journal . According to the terms of the agreement: • The Iraqi government and the Mahdi Army would observe a four-day cease-fire. • At the end of the cease-fire, Iraqi forces would be allowed to enter Sadr City and conduct arrests if warrants have been issued, or if the Mahdi Army is in possession of medium or heavy weapons (rocket-propelled grenades, rockets, mortars). • The Mahdi Army and the Sadrist bloc must recognize the Iraqi government has control over the security situation and has the authority to move security forces to impose the law. • The Mahdi Army would end all attacks, including mortar and rockets strikes against the In...

If the Pulitzer Prize Committee were on its toes, it might consider awarding “ The Long War Journal ” a Pulitzer for superior reporting from the war front: “Fighting in Sadr City has been heavy over the past four days. The largest engagements occurred on April 29 when a large force of Mahdi Army fighters ambushed a US patrol on the border area where the wall is being built. US forces responded and killed 28 Mahdi Army fighters while suffering six wounded. On April 27, 22 Mahdi Army fighters were killed as they massed to strike at a checkpoint in Sadr City. Sixteen more were killed in separate engagements that same day.’ That is not the sort of paragraph one sees in the usual reports in major newspapers, most of which spun off the operative premise that Muqtada al Sadr would be successful in his promised “uprising.” Nothing could be further from the truth . “US and Iraqi troops killed 173 Mahdi fighters from the period between March 25 and March 30, when the Basrah offensive began up un...

There are two wars in Iraq: the real war, reported most accurately on such sites as The Long War Journal ; and the imaginative war that leers at us from the campaign literature of partisans and their cheerleaders in the media, most of whom are uniformly a’gin it. The trouble with the latter war is that the real war is not likely to conform to campaign demonization after the campaign is over and someone other than President George Bush is hoisted into office. Will that president be, quite literally, hoisted by his own petard?