Michael Yon just emailed:
Greetings,
General David Petraeus has announced the beginning of a major offensive in Iraq.
I have satellite gear and should be posting daily updates.
Meanwhile, the final dispatch from my time with British forces is posted: Death or Glory IV.
Yon’s alert appears to correlate with last weeks Blog Week in Review interview with Dr. David Kilcullen—Senior Counterinsurgency Adviser to Gen. Petraeus. Kilcullen explains that the media still doesn’t “get it”.
Here’s my rough transcript of this segment beginning about 20:30: Kilcullen says
“Some people in the media are starting to write off the surge… but what we’ve been doing to date is putting forces into position — we haven’t started the surge as yet.
What I would say to people who say it has already failed is “watch this space”, because, you’ll see in fairly short order some changes in the way we are operating that will make what’s been happening over the past few months look like what it is - just a preliminary buildup.”
In an earlier segment of this interview: Dr. Kilcullen gives the best briefing I’ve read/heard on how al Qaeda has nurtured the vicious cycle of violence since the Samarra mosque bombing in 2006. This discussion begins at about 11:30 in the podcast.
This half hour interview is a very efficient briefing on sophisticated counterinsurgency. Highly recommended. You can download the podcast at Counterinsurgency and Competing Narratives [MP3].
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