Letter from Iraq

This is an interesting read. This part stood out for me:

Proudest Moment — It's a tie every day, watching our Marines produce phenomenal intelligence products that go pretty far in teasing apart Bad Guy operations in al-Anbar. Every night Marines and Soldiers are kicking in doors and grabbing Bad Guys based on intelligence developed by our guys. We rarely lose a Marine during these raids, they are so well-informed of the objective. A bunch of kids right out of high school shouldn't be able to work so well, but they do.

This dovetails with what a former Green Beret who served in Iraq and Afghanistan told me the other week. I asked him what he thought of what was going on in Iraq, if we were making progress of if the whole thing was just screwed. He said that there is so much stuff that goes unreported, lots of good stuff we don't know about. He said that every night the US special forces are kicking down the doors of bad guys and nabbing them, and the bad guys are suffering in a very bad way. We hear about our losses, but we don't hear about many of the successes. Part of this, he said, is because if we talk about these operations the enemy will be able to change tactics, and we can't afford to run the risk of giving anything away.

He also made the analogy to living in DC. He said, look, if all you knew about DC was what you read in the paper, would you move here? Iraq is a big place, he pointed out, both relative to the size of other Middle Eastern countries and the size of a human being. Bad stuff happens within that big space, but it isn't the whole story.

Who knows -- take it for what it's worth.