For over a year the media and many officials were spooking us with the exaggerated ghost of civil war. I wonder what they have to say now! I think their silence is more telling than anything they would've said.
Iraqis are awakening, one very telling example can be seen in the ongoing operation in Diyala; members of the 1920 revolution brigades, once bitter enemies of the US military and Iraqi government are now assisting US and Iraqi military in fighting al-Qaeda even though the majority of the Iraqi soldiers and officers are Shia. If the change in exclusively Sunni Anbar is good then the change in Diyala is good beyond
words.
I noted this possibility more than a year and a half ago, as a continuation of a trend that began in the summer of 2004. I concluded:
This trend will lead to victory over the enemy and may well solidify a national Iraqi identity first forged in the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. We shall see if the artificiality of Iraq is any more significant than the artificiality of any other country that relies on lines drawn on maps to describe itself.
Focusing on the bomb of the day makes you miss the long-term trends that point to advances against the enemy.
