Blackfive & Iraq in a nutshell

First, something cool: The Wall Street Journal published an article reflecting on 10 years of blogging, which mentioned Blackfive.net as a "blog WSJ reads". Blackfive in turn mentioned us as a blog he reads. So by the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon rule we have been mentioned in Wall Street Journal. Not that being mentioned by Blackfive isn't prestigious!

In other news we were recently asked by a media outlet how things were going in Anbar province. The change over the past year has been amazing. Hell, even the change since we got here in January has been noticeable. The sheiks and the tribes they lead have thrown in their lot with us despite a constant murder and intimidation campaign by Al Qaeda. Our approach to counterinsurgency is working and is an illustration that given enough time, ordinary men and women -- the Iraqis we work with every day -- will say "Enough violence is enough." They're tired of their children dying, and of fearing for their lives just because they had the nerve to try to keep their neighborhoods safe.

I could go on for pages. I think if you talk to the vast majority of Marines out here you'll see that the optimism we're pushing out is legitimate. One anecdotal bit is that we have to really campaign to get mainstream media outlets to our AO. Why is that? Because it's freaking calm out here. Mike Yon came out here for almost a month and didn't have anything to write about. He filed a couple of very minor dispatches but he writes about open warfare -- it's what "sells the papers" for him. We still have a little bit of "bang bang shoot 'em up" but the recurring story out here is that the Anbar people have thrown up their hands and seen that we are the good guys.

The bottom line is that we are freaking winning out here. And the really astonishing thing is that Coalition Forces aren't the main effort -- we're simply an enabling factor. The Iraqi people, the moms and dads of Iraq, are the ones who are winning this war.