Of all that has been written about the play of things in Iraq, nothing that I have seen approximates the truth of what our ambassador to Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, recently said of this war: “In the end, how we leave and what we leave behind will be more important than how we came.”

It is odd, then, that critics have launched a new attack on the origins of the war at precisely the time a new order in Iraq is taking hold. But American liberal opinion is obsessive today. Scott McClellan can’t be accused of strategic thinking, but he has been anointed a peer of Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft. A witness and a presumed insider – a “Texas loyalist” – has “flipped.”

Associated Press Photo/Nabil al-Jurani

Iraqi Army soldiers secure Basra, April 2008.

Mr. McClellan wades into the deep question of whether this war was a war of “necessity” or a war of “choice.” He does so in the sixth year of the war, at a time when many have forgotten what was thought and said before its onset. The nation was gripped by legitimate concern over gathering dangers in the aftermath of 9/11. Kabul and the war against the Taliban had not sufficed, for those were Arabs who struck America on 9/11. A war of deterrence had to be waged against Arab radicalism, and Saddam Hussein had drawn the short straw. He had not ducked, he had not scurried for cover. He openly mocked America’s grief, taunted its power.

We don’t need to overwork the stereotype that Arabs understand and respond to the logic of force, but this is a region sensitive to the wind, and to the will of outside powers. Before America struck into Iraq, a mere 18 months after 9/11, there had been glee in the Arab world, a sense that America had gotten its comeuppance. There were regimes hunkering down, feigning friendship with America while aiding and abetting the forces of terror.

Liberal opinion in America and Europe may have scoffed when President Bush drew a strict moral line between order and radicalism – he even inserted into the political vocabulary the unfashionable notion of evil – but this sort of clarity is in the nature of things in that Greater Middle East. It is in categories of good and evil that men and women in those lands describe their world. The unyielding campaign waged by this president made a deep impression on them.

Nowadays, we hear many who have never had a kind word to say about the Iraq War pronounce on the retreat of the jihadists. It is as though the Islamists had gone back to their texts and returned with second thoughts about their violent utopia. It is as though the financiers and the “charities” that aided the terror had reconsidered their loyalties and opted out of that sly, cynical trade. Nothing could be further from the truth. If Islamism is on the ropes, if the regimes in the saddle in key Arab states now show greater resolve in taking on the forces of radicalism, no small credit ought to be given to this American project in Iraq.

We should give the “theorists” of terror their due and read them with some discernment. To a man, they have told us that they have been bloodied in Iraq, that they have been surprised by the stoicism of the Americans, by the staying power of the Bush administration.

There is no way of convincing a certain segment of opinion that there are indeed wars of “necessity.” A case can always be made that an aggressor ought to be given what he seeks, that the costs of war are prohibitively high when measured against the murky ways of peace and of daily life.

“Wars are not self-starting,” the noted philosopher Michael Walzer wrote in his seminal book, “Just and Unjust Wars.” “They may ‘break out,’ like an accidental fire, under conditions difficult to analyze and where the attribution of responsibility seems impossible. But usually they are more like arson than accident: war has human agents as well as human victims.”

Fair enough. In the narrow sense of command and power, this war in Iraq is Mr. Bush’s war. But it is an evasion of responsibility to leave this war at his doorstep. This was a war fought with congressional authorization, with the warrant of popular acceptance, and the sanction of United Nations resolutions which called for Iraq’s disarmament. It is the political good fortune (in the world of Democratic Party activists) that Sen. Barack Obama was spared the burden of a vote in the United States Senate to authorize the war. By his telling, he would have us believe that he would have cast a vote against it. But there is no sure way of knowing whether he would have stood up to the wind.

With the luxury of hindsight, the critics of the war now depict the arguments made for it as a case of manipulation and deceit. This is odd and misplaced: The claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were to prove incorrect, but they were made in good faith.

It is also obtuse and willful to depict in dark colors the effort made to “sell” the war. Wars can’t be waged in stealth, and making the moral case for them is an obligation incumbent on the leaders who launch them. If anything, there were stretches of time, and critical turning points, when the administration abdicated the fight for public opinion.

Nor is there anything unprecedented, or particularly dishonest, about the way the rationale for the war shifted when the hunt for weapons of mass destruction had run aground. True, the goal of a democratic Iraq – and the broader agenda of the war as a spearhead of “reform” in Arab and Muslim lands – emerged a year or so after the onset of the war. But the aims of practically every war always shift with the course of combat, and with historical circumstances. Need we recall that the abolition of slavery had not been an “original” war aim, and that the Emancipation Proclamation was, by Lincoln’s own admission, a product of circumstances? A war for the Union had become a victory for abolitionism.

America had not been prepared for nation-building in Iraq; we had not known Iraq and Iraqis or understood the depth of Iraq’s breakdown. But there was nothing so startling or unusual about the connection George W. Bush made between American security and the “reform” of the Arab condition. As America’s pact with the Arab autocrats had hatched a monster, it was logical and prudent to look for a new way.

“When a calf falls, a thousand knives flash,” goes an Arabic proverb. The authority of this administration is ebbing away, the war in Iraq is unloved, and even the “loyalists” now see these years of panic and peril as a time of exaggerated fear.

It is not easy to tell people of threats and dangers they have been spared. The war put on notice regimes and conspirators who had harbored dark thoughts about America and who, in the course of the 1990s, were led to believe that terrible deeds against America would go unpunished. A different lesson was taught in Iraq. Nowadays, the burden of the war, in blood and treasure, is easy to see, while the gains, subtle and real, are harder to demonstrate. Last month, American casualties in Iraq were at their lowest since 2003. The Sunnis also have broken with al Qaeda, and the Shiite-led government has taken the war to the Mahdi Army: Is it any wonder that the critics have returned to the origins of the war?

Five months from now, the American public will vote on this war, in the most dramatic and definitive of ways. There will be people who heed Ambassador Crocker’s admonition. And there will be others keen on retelling how we made our way to Iraq.

Mr. Ajami, a Bradley Prize recipient, teaches at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of “The Foreigner’s Gift” (Free Press, 2006).

Marie Colvin in Mosul

American and Iraqi forces are driving Al-Qaeda in Iraq out of its last redoubt in the north of the country in the culmination of one of the most spectacular victories of the war on terror.

After being forced from its strongholds in the west and centre of Iraq in the past two years, Al-Qaeda’s dwindling band of fighters has made a defiant “last stand” in the northern city of Mosul.

A huge operation to crush the 1,200 fighters who remained from a terrorist force once estimated at more than 12,000 began on May 10.

Operation Lion’s Roar, in which the Iraqi army combined forces with the Americans’ 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment, has already resulted in the death of Abu Khalaf, the Al-Qaeda leader, and the capture of more than 1,000 suspects.

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The group has been reduced to hit-and-run attacks, including one that killed two off-duty policemen yesterday, and sporadic bombings aimed at killing large numbers of officials and civilians.

Last Friday I joined the 2nd Iraqi Division as it supported local police in a house-to-house search for one such bomb after intelligence pointed to a large explosion today.

Even in the district of Zanjali, previously a hotbed of the insurgency, it was possible to accompany an Iraqi colonel on foot through streets of breeze-block houses studded with bullet holes. Hundreds of houses were searched without resistance but no bomb was found, only 60kg of explosives.

American and Iraqi leaders believe that while it would be premature to write off Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Sunni group has lost control of its last urban base in Mosul and its remnants have been largely driven into the countryside to the south.

Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq’s prime minister, who has also led a crackdown on the Shi’ite Mahdi Army in Basra and Baghdad in recent months, claimed yesterday that his government had “defeated” terrorism.

“They were intending to besiege Baghdad and control it,” Maliki said. “But thanks to the will of the tribes, security forces, army and all Iraqis, we defeated them.”

The number of foreign fighters coming over the border from Syria to bolster Al-Qaeda’s numbers is thought to have declined to as few as 20 a month, compared with 120 a month at its peak.

Brigadier General Abdullah Abdul, a senior Iraqi commander, said: “We’ve limited their movements with check-points. They are doing small attacks and trying big ones, but they’re mostly not succeeding.”

Major-General Mark Hertling, American commander in the north, said: “I think we’re at the irreversible point.”

Analysis: US now winning Iraq war that seemed lost

By ROBERT BURNS and ROBERT H. REID – 2 days ago

BAGHDAD (AP) — The United States is now winning the war that two years ago seemed lost.

Limited, sometimes sharp fighting and periodic terrorist bombings in Iraq are likely to continue, possibly for years. But the Iraqi government and the U.S. now are able to shift focus from mainly combat to mainly building the fragile beginnings of peace — a transition that many found almost unthinkable as recently as one year ago.

Despite the occasional bursts of violence, Iraq has reached the point where the insurgents, who once controlled whole cities, no longer have the clout to threaten the viability of the central government.

That does not mean the war has ended or that U.S. troops have no role in Iraq. It means the combat phase finally is ending, years past the time when President Bush optimistically declared it had. The new phase focuses on training the Iraqi army and police, restraining the flow of illicit weaponry from Iran, supporting closer links between Baghdad and local governments, pushing the integration of former insurgents into legitimate government jobs and assisting in rebuilding the economy.

Scattered battles go on, especially against al-Qaida holdouts north of Baghdad. But organized resistance, with the steady drumbeat of bombings, kidnappings, assassinations and ambushes that once rocked the capital daily, has all but ceased.

This amounts to more than a lull in the violence. It reflects a fundamental shift in the outlook for the Sunni minority, which held power under Saddam Hussein. They launched the insurgency five years ago. They now are either sidelined or have switched sides to cooperate with the Americans in return for money and political support.

Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, told The Associated Press this past week there are early indications that senior leaders of al-Qaida may be considering shifting their main focus from Iraq to the war in Afghanistan.

Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, told the AP on Thursday that the insurgency as a whole has withered to the point where it is no longer a threat to Iraq’s future.

“Very clearly, the insurgency is in no position to overthrow the government or, really, even to challenge it,” Crocker said. “It’s actually almost in no position to try to confront it. By and large, what’s left of the insurgency is just trying to hang on.”

Shiite militias, notably the Mahdi Army of radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, have lost their power bases in Baghdad, Basra and other major cities. An important step was the routing of Shiite extremists in the Sadr City slums of eastern Baghdad this spring — now a quiet though not fully secure district.

Al-Sadr and top lieutenants are now in Iran. Still talking of a comeback, they are facing major obstacles, including a loss of support among a Shiite population weary of war and no longer as terrified of Sunni extremists as they were two years ago.

Despite the favorable signs, U.S. commanders are leery of proclaiming victory or promising that the calm will last.

The premature declaration by the Bush administration of “Mission Accomplished” in May 2003 convinced commanders that the best public relations strategy is to promise little, and couple all good news with the warning that “security is fragile” and that the improvements, while encouraging, are “not irreversible.”

Iraq still faces a mountain of problems: sectarian rivalries, power struggles within the Sunni and Shiite communities, Kurdish-Arab tensions, corruption. Anyone could rekindle widespread fighting.

But the underlying dynamics in Iraqi society that blew up the U.S. military’s hopes for an early exit, shortly after the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, have changed in important ways in recent months.

Systematic sectarian killings have all but ended in the capital, in large part because of tight security and a strategy of walling off neighborhoods purged of minorities in 2006.

That has helped establish a sense of normalcy in the streets of the capital. People are expressing a new confidence in their own security forces, which in turn are exhibiting a newfound assertiveness with the insurgency largely in retreat.

Statistics show violence at a four-year low. The monthly American death toll appears to be at its lowest of the war — four killed in action so far this month as of Friday, compared with 66 in July a year ago. From a daily average of 160 insurgent attacks in July 2007, the average has plummeted to about two dozen a day this month. On Wednesday the nationwide total was 13.

Beyond that, there is something in the air in Iraq this summer.

In Baghdad, parks are filled every weekend with families playing and picnicking with their children. That was unthinkable only a year ago, when the first, barely visible signs of a turnaround emerged.

Now a moment has arrived for the Iraqis to try to take those positive threads and weave them into a lasting stability.

The questions facing both Americans and Iraqis are: What kinds of help will the country need from the U.S. military, and for how long? The questions will take on greater importance as the U.S. presidential election nears, with one candidate pledging a troop withdrawal and the other insisting on staying.

Iraqi authorities have grown dependent on the U.S. military after more than five years of war. While they are aiming for full sovereignty with no foreign troops on their soil, they do not want to rush. In a similar sense, the Americans fear that after losing more than 4,100 troops, the sacrifice could be squandered.

U.S. commanders say a substantial American military presence will be needed beyond 2009. But judging from the security gains that have been sustained over the first half of this year — as the Pentagon withdrew five Army brigades sent as reinforcements in 2007 — the remaining troops could be used as peacekeepers more than combatants.

As a measure of the transitioning U.S. role, Maj. Gen. Jeffery Hammond says that when he took command of American forces in the Baghdad area about seven months ago he was spending 80 percent of his time working on combat-related matters and about 20 percent on what the military calls “nonkinetic” issues, such as supporting the development of Iraqi government institutions and humanitarian aid.

Now Hammond estimates those percentage have been almost reversed. For several hours one recent day, for example, Hammond consulted on water projects with a Sunni sheik in the Radwaniyah area of southwest Baghdad, then spent time with an Iraqi physician/entrepreneur in the Dora district of southern Baghdad — an area, now calm, that in early 2007 was one of the capital’s most violent zones.

“We’re getting close to something that looks like an end to mass violence in Iraq,” says Stephen Biddle, an analyst at the Council of Foreign Relations who has advised Petraeus on war strategy. Biddle is not ready to say it’s over, but he sees the U.S. mission shifting from fighting the insurgents to keeping the peace.

Although Sunni and Shiite extremists are still around, they have surrendered the initiative and have lost the support of many ordinary Iraqis. That can be traced to an altered U.S. approach to countering the insurgency — a Petraeus-driven move to take more U.S. troops off their big bases and put them in Baghdad neighborhoods where they mixed with ordinary Iraqis and built a new level of trust.

Army Col. Tom James, a brigade commander who is on his third combat tour in Iraq, explains the new calm this way:

“We’ve put out the forest fire. Now we’re dealing with pop-up fires.”

It’s not the end of fighting. It looks like the beginning of a perilous peace.

Maj. Gen. Ali Hadi Hussein al-Yaseri, the chief of patrol police in the capital, sees the changes.

“Even eight months ago, Baghdad was not today’s Baghdad,” he says.

EDITOR’S NOTE _ Robert Burns is AP’s chief military reporter, and Robert Reid is AP’s chief of bureau in Baghdad. Reid has covered the war from his post in Iraq since the U.S. invasion in March 2003. Burns, based in Washington, has made 21 reporting trips to Iraq; on his latest during July, Burns spent nearly three weeks in central and northern Iraq, observing military operations and interviewing both U.S. and Iraqi officers.

Over half of American voters (51%) now believe the United States and its allies are winning the war on terror, the highest figure recorded in nearly four years by Rasmussen Reports in a nationwide survey.

Only 16% now think the terrorists are on top, while 27% view it as a stalemate. Prior to this week’s survey, the number who believe the terrorists are winning had never fallen below 20%.

Last July, just 36% thought the U.S. and its allies were winning. At that time, an equal number—36%–thought the terrorists were ahead.

Other indicators in the survey also show that Americans have growing confidence that things are looking up in the war on terror.

Forty-two percent (42%) now think the situation in Iraq will improve over the next six months. That’s up from 37% a week ago and 23% a year ago.

Only 23% now expect things to get worse in Iraq, down from 49% last July.

The gap also is narrowing dramatically between those who think history will judge the war in Iraq as a success – 36% now – versus those who think it will be viewed as a failure (39%).

These results continue a trend noted last week when 48% said the U.S. and its allies were winning versus 20% who saw the terrorists ahead. The 28-point difference was the most favorable margin recorded by Rasmussen Reports since tracking began in January 2004. The previous high was established on September 6, 2004, when 52% thought the U.S. and its allies were winning but 26% thought the terrorists were winning — a 26-point favorable margin.

Now 35 points separate those who think the U.S. is ahead as opposed to the terrorists.

For the first time in months, more Democrats (35%) also think the U.S. is winning versus the number who credit the terrorists with being ahead (26%), although nearly a third (31%) are undecided. Last week, only 27% of Democrats thought the U.S. was winning.

Even as Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama tours the war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq on a fact-finding trip, Americans are evenly divided on whether he is too inexperienced to be president. Forty-five percent (45%) say Obama, who has been in the Senate three years after serving as a state legislator in Illinois, lacks the experience to sit in the White House, a number that has been trending higher in recent weeks. An identical percentage disagree.

The results on the war on terror come as a separate Rasmussen Reports national survey this week found that 63% of Americans want the troops brought home from Iraq within a year, reflecting little change in voter attitudes since tracking of this question began last August. Still, just 24% want the troops withdrawn immediately.

Forty-four percent (44%) of voters think the United States is safer today than before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but 39% disagree. Both figures are roughly comparable to the most optimistic figures on record.

Obama and Republican presidential candidate John McCain have stepped up their criticism of each other’s positions on the wars on terror and in Iraq in recent days, largely due to Obama’s current overseas trip. McCain, a longtime supporter of the war in Iraq, has consistently pushed for more U.S. troops there, and this so-called surge of forces is credited with bringing stability to the war-torn country. Obama remains a critic of the war but now acknowledges that the surge, which he opposed, has worked.

In another recent survey, however, 48% of Americans agreed with Obama that Afghanistan, and not Iraq, should be the “central front” in the war on terror.

Still in new polling this week McCain is again trusted by voters more than Obama when it comes to Iraq and the broader issue of national security.

Now 61% of men think the U.S. and its allies are winning the war on terror, up from 54% last week and 49% the week before. The number of women who agree has held steady at 43% for two weeks in a row, up from 37% a week earlier.

The percentage of Republicans who see the U.S. and its allies ahead also stayed roughly the same at 78%. Forty-five percent (45%) of unaffiliated voters, a bloc critical to the upcoming presidential election, agree, up two percentage points from a week earlier and 36% the week before that. Nationally, the race between Barack Obama and John McCain remains very close in the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll.

Thirty percent (30%) of likely Obama voters also see the U.S. winning, while 26% of them disagree.

Rasmussen Reports will continue polling weekly on this topic through the election and then resume monthly tracking. Weekly updates are posted on the Obama-McCain: By the Numbers page.

During weekly tracking in Election 2004, confidence that the U.S. and its allies were winning ranged from a low of 45% to a high of 52%, but the number who thought the terrorists were winning never fell below 25%.

The war on terror was the number one issue for voters in the 2004 election cycle. Voters now identify economic issues as their number one concern.

President Bush’s record low approval ratings have improved slightly from the new confidence in the outcome of the war on terror. Forty-six percent (46%) rate his job performance as poor, down from 49% last week, while 27% rate his work as good or excellent for the second week in a row.

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Iraq hopes new Najaf airport heralds tourism boom

Sun Jul 20, 2008 6:42am EDT

By Khaled Farhan

NAJAF, Iraq (Reuters) - Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki made the inaugural flight to a new airport in the Shi’ite holy city of Najaf on Sunday, which officials hope will usher in a boom in religious tourism.

Developers say 9 million pilgrims visit the shrine of Imam Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammad, in the southern city and other holy sites nearby each year, and planners hope the airport will increase visitor numbers 10 percent annually.

The opening comes a day after Iraq laid the foundation stone for a luxury hotel in Baghdad. That was the first project to receive a license from Iraq’s new investment commission.

“The political and economic success in Iraq will make it a centre for those who want to invest, and the opening of this airport is a step on this road … this is a message to investors to come to Iraq,” Maliki told reporters in Najaf.

Maliki and other officials are on a drive to promote investment with violence in Iraq at a four-year low. Foreign direct investment in Iraq was a mere $272 million in 2006, according to U.N. statistics.

The new airport is part of a multi-billion dollar project led by investment firm Al-Aqeelah, based in Kuwait, a country with its own large Shi’ite minority. The firm also plans to build thousands of new homes and hotels in the city.

The firm is in talks with neighboring states to start passenger services to the airport, in which it says it invested $50 million. The total cost of the airport was unclear.

“The question shouldn’t be why we chose to invest in Najaf. The question should be why don’t we choose Najaf? It’s one of the most noble places in the world,” Nazeh Khajah, Al-Aqeelah’s head of marketing and public relations, told Reuters.

Up to 15 percent of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims are Shi’ite. They live mainly in Iran, Iraq, other parts of the Middle East, Turkey and Afghanistan, but there are sizeable communities elsewhere, including the West.

In November, Iran said it was pressing Iraq to increase the number of Iranian pilgrims allowed to visit Shi’ite sites each year to three million, six times the current number.

Najaf is home to one of the Middle East’s biggest cemeteries, which draws millions of mourners, and is also close to the holy Shi’ite cities of Kufa and Kerbala, where Maliki said another airport was due to be opened.

“If they made a service from London to Najaf, or even another from another city close to London I think the developers will deserve to go to heaven,” said Mudaar Ali Ebrahim, a Shi’ite living in London.

Iraq needs massive investment to provide jobs that officials hope will cement security gains. Years of war and sanctions have left the country’s infrastructure in tatters.

(Additional reporting by Baghdad bureau and Zahra Hosseinian in Tehran, Writing by Mohammed Abbas and Tim Cocks, Editing by Ibon Villelabeitia)

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Iraq’s banking sector eyes growth as violence falls

Wed Jul 23, 2008 6:29am EDT

By Mohammed Abbas

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq’s banking sector is showing signs of growth as violence has dropped to a four-year low, with lending, deposits and electronic transfers up sharply in recent months, U.S. embassy statistics show.

The volume of loans issued by private banks in February jumped by almost half to $755 million compared with October, and the value of letters of credit outstanding in March more than doubled to $189 million versus October.

“The improved security situation has made business, trade and activities possible that weren’t possible before,” Charles Ries, a senior U.S. official at the embassy who is tasked with helping Iraq revamp its economy told Reuters.

The embassy’s statistics included data collated from a range of Iraqi sources. The central bank and Iraq’s finance ministry have not responded to requests for data and bank officials, including at private banks, were not available to comment.

The figures are tiny by international banking standards, but are significant for a country trying to rebuild its financial sector and boost investment after years of war and sanctions.

Ries has helped some Iraqi banks adopt the SWIFT system of international electronic bank transfers, a crucial step for integration into the global banking system.

About half of the 41 banks licensed to operate in Iraq now have SWIFT, the embassy said. Some of these banks are foreign.

Many large transactions in Iraq are still conducted in cash, and businessmen and contractors often fly into Baghdad laden with bricks of dollar bills.

The U.S. military, a major spender in Iraq, now insists any transaction of over $50,000 be made electronically.

In the Iraq central bank’s daily auction for dollars, the amount traded in cash has remained stable for almost two years, but there has been a steady increase in transfers.

“That’s evidence of a more normal, more internationally orientated banking system,” Ries said in a recent interview.

BUDGET EXECUTION

Swelled by record oil prices, Iraq’s cabinet recently proposed raising the 2008 budget to $70 billion — up from $41 billion last year.

Budget execution is crucial to reviving Iraq’s economy, and the departure of many experienced technocrats since the fall of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein five years ago has made the effective expenditure of state cash difficult.

Iraq’s parliamentary economic committee said some 55 percent of last year’s budget set aside for investment was spent, with initial indicators showing it could rise to 70 percent in 2008.

“Iraq needs to continue to improve budget execution … It’s very hard to spend that much money reasonably, and so there’s an enormous effort that needs to be made,” Ries said.

Despite signs of increased activity in private sector banking, over 90 percent of bank deposits — of which more than 60 percent are from the government — are held by the two largest state-owned banks.

But while these banks pay pensions and salaries, more Iraqis are turning to private banks for commercial needs, Ries said.

“The private banks take care of a farmer wanting to buy a tractor, the furniture guy paying some bills — that’s what we want … customers are using bank accounts rather than keeping everything in cash, and that promotes economic activity.”

Private banks have begun to expand their operations to branches outside of Baghdad and take more risk on their loan portfolios, the U.S. embassy said.

(Editing by Stephen Nisbet)

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Iraq attacks, U.S. casualties at 4-year low

BY JAMES GORDON MEEK
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU

Sunday, July 13th 2008, 12:11 AM

WASHINGTON - Combat, bombings and sniper attacks in Iraq - along with U.S. casualties - have plummeted from the highest point of the war 13 months ago to a four-year low, new military statistics show.

Every category of violence has dramatically fallen to the lowest levels since March 2004.

Military officers in Baghdad offer cautious optimism that the insurgency’s violent grip is closer to being broken than ever.

“Violence is at its lowest level in more than four years and IED [improvised explosive device] incidents are at their lowest level since we first began recording them,” Navy Lt. David Russell, a spokesman for Multi-National Forces-Iraq, said last week.

The number of attacks has dropped like a rock since enemy violence peaked in June 2007, four months after the start of the surge, according to an internal military document.

Ethno-sectarian violence, which exploded after the 2006 bombing of a Shiite mosque in Samarra, is a fraction of what it was then, the document says.

“We all know that there will be good days and bad days in Iraq, but the important thing is that we see security incidents trending in the right direction,” Russell said.

“The security situation is probably the best we’ve ever seen it,” added Army Maj. Gen. Michael Oates, commander of the Fort Drum-based 10th Mountain Division in central Iraq.

Iraq’s good news might boost surge-backer John McCain’s GOP presidential bid if not for rising casualties in Afghanistan - a focus of Democratic opponent Barack Obama’s counterterror policy - which passed G.I. deaths in Iraq in May and June.

There are signs the downward trend in Iraq may have bottomed out.

In Anbar Province west of Baghdad, the former Sunni extremist hotbed has seen a recent uptick in coalition deaths.

In May, elite U.S. sniper teams killed over 100 insurgents as they set up ambushes and planted IEDs in Fallujah and Ramadi, senior U.S. special operations sources told The News.

U.S. officials predicted that Al Qaeda of Iraq operatives who survived surge offensives went underground and will strike before the U.S. and Iraqi fall elections.

“Violence is going to be involved in the Iraqi election,” said one top Special Forces officer.

jmeek@nydailynews.com

U.S. general Petraeus: al-Qaida may be easing effort in Iraq

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Saturday, July 19th 2008, 10:59 AM

BAGHDAD — Senior leaders of al-Qaida may be diverting fighters from the war in Iraq to the Afghan frontier area, the top American commander in Iraq told The Associated Press on Saturday.

Gen. David Petraeus also said al-Qaida may be reconsidering Iraq as its highest priority war front.

“There is some intelligence that has picked this up,” he said in the interview in his office at the U.S. Embassy along the Tigris River. “It’s not solid gold intelligence,” he added, stressing that the reliability of the information has not been confirmed and that it does not mean al-Qaida has given up on Iraq.

Nonetheless, he cited the signs as part of a broadly positive review of conditions in Iraq, where al-Qaida fighters over the past year have been driven almost entirely from Baghdad and pummeled in other urban areas.

The other main source of violence over the past year — Shiite militia extremists — also has been curbed. Petraeus said that whether leaders of those Shiite groups, who fled in many cases to Iran, end up returning to fight for control of such Baghdad sections as Sadr City will be a critical bellwether.

“This will be very important because it will be an indicator of whether Iran intends to start a new chapter in its relationship with Iraq, or not,” he said.

Petraeus said his information about a possible shift in al-Qaida resources away from Iraq was based on human intelligence, meaning informants. If confirmed, it could have profound implications not only for Iraq, where terrorist and insurgent violence has been on a steep decline, but also for Afghanistan, where militants crossing the border from Pakistan are a growing threat to the government in Kabul.

“There are unsubstantiated rumors and reflections that perhaps some foreign fighters originally intended for Iraq may have gone to the FATA,” he said, referring to the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan, where extremists have a secure staging ground for movements into neighboring Afghanistan.

“We do think that there is some assessment ongoing as to the continued viability of al-Qaida’s fight in Iraq,” he said. “They’re not going to abandon Iraq, they’re not going to write it off. None of that. But what they certainly may do is start to provide some of those resources that would have come to Iraq to Pakistan, possibly Afghanistan.”

Petraeus said that until now, communications from senior leaders of al-Qaida to their lieutenants in Iraq have made clear that Iraq is its highest priority for establishing an Islamic state within reach of the West.

“That could be under review,” Petraeus said. “We do think they are considering what should be the main effort.”

The implication of Petraeus’s remark is that al-Qaida might be turning more attention, resources and fighters to Afghanistan, where more than 30,000 U.S. troops are part of an international security force that has fought increasingly bloody battles over the past two years, especially in the south.

This information, while unconfirmed, parallels reports that fewer foreign fighters are joining the insurgency in Iraq.

“We do know the foreign fighter flow into Iraq has been reduced very substantially,” he said.

Even if it proves true that al-Qaida is putting less effort into Iraq, Petraeus said that does not mean the terrorist network that originally was based in Afghanistan before U.S. forces invaded the country in October 2001 will give up entirely on fighting in Iraq.

“Al-Qaida very much remains a factor” in Iraq, he said.

Petraeus is due to leave his post in Baghdad in September to head U.S. Central Command, with responsibility for U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, Pakistan as well as Iraq. He is to be replaced in Bahgdad by Gen. Raymond Odierno, who until February had served as the No. 2 commander in Iraq.

In the AP interview, Petraeus also applauded the news Saturday that Iraq’s largest Sunni Arab political bloc has ended a nearly yearlong boycott of the Shiite-led government. During the interview, an aide rushed into his office to deliver the news, eliciting a big smile from Petraeus and instructions to pass along his congratulations.

“It’s a very important step forward,” he said.