For Iraqis, the horror of living under forced sharia was something they hadn’t experienced for 100 years or more and was enough to turn the tide of public opinion about who the greater enemy was

From what I've read, it wasn't so much the idea of Sharia law that turned Iraqi Sunnis against Al Qaeda, it was that Al Qaeda became a burden rather than a guest of those tribes. Rather than supporting and protecting those tribes, they put them in danger and began to micro-manage their daily lives and social structure, to the point where Al Qaeda leaders were arranging marriages of Iraqi women against the father's wishes. In the end, Al Qaeda was killing them when they didn't do as they were told. Once Al Qaeda became the oppressor, then then re-evaluated their opinions of the US backed government.

If you ask me, the way to beat Al Qaeda is Pakistan in to work to create a similar environment. Make sure that the Pashtun tribes there become burdened with Al Qaeda, and they will soon turn against them.

Note-anyone whose instinctive response to that last line was "then kill the people supporting the insurgency" need to punch themselves in the crotch about a dozen times.

I thought that after all the scandals about journalists misleading the public by repeating government leaks and press releases and “reporting” from escorted tours, major journalists like columnists at the Washington Post would have learned something. Apparently not. Repetition of government propaganda without independent investigation or analysis does not constitute journalism. Readers can decide what it does constitute.

Of course, if you're not an expert like Rubin, you hear Iggy and you have no clue that you're just hearing gov't talking points, so you can't really judge what it *does* constitute.

We have this image of journalists as independent researchers, where it seems they're both intellectually and professionally lazy, on the whole.

A must read below, but Ignatius misses the mark in his conclusions because he simply does not understand the new counterinsurgency strategy for which he lays credit for defeating al Qaeda. That new strategy is not one of a smaller......