Saturday, January 12, 2008
Instead of moving that, nope, you need to re-up:
Awesome new co-worker Colin Soloway and I were talking about this at the office yesterday. This Baghdad neighborhood that the U.S. has been bombing? That's Arab Jabour, a place cited by General Petraeus and the White House as a surge success story. Luckily, Jamie Gumbrecht and Nancy Youssef of McClatchy are on top of it:
The targets were near the town of Arab Jabour, a Sunni Muslim-dominated district on Baghdad's outskirts that American officials recently held up as a security success and an example of how local Sunni tribesmen known as "concerned local citizens" had turned against al Qaida in Iraq.

But Thursday's air attack indicated that the area still has a considerable Sunni militant presence. The statement said that more than 40 targets in three large areas were hit during two passes by two supersonic B-1 bombers and four F-16 fighter jets. A U.S. military official in the area said the targets were al Qaida in Iraq weapons caches and bomb-making materials.

The blitz dropped 38 bombs in its first 10 minutes, the statement said.

Forty thousand pounds of bombs. It's counterinsurgency-rific! And goddamn it, why can't Gumbrecht and Youssef acknowledge that the surge succeeded????//

--Spencer Ackerman