Bit I'm going to wait for an actual trend, like, say, continued reductions in fatalities for the next three months. Until then, what you have is a stitistical aberration. Iraq is not a harmonious nation, overjoyed at the cultural mashup we are creating by force. And none of this wipes away the stain of thousands dead while "staying the course". More soldiers = better security situation has been a given for YEARS, but conservatives couldn't be bothered, for the most part.

I have no sympathy at all for the cheerleaders that try desperately to sell this polished t()rd of a successful Surge, while studiously ignoring even their own bleatings about plenty of troops already on the ground when challenged by progressives. Two or three months down the road, then we'll see if this is a trend. Oh, hey, if it is a trend, we'll get to bring our soldiers home, right?

Tell me something new, please. All this shows is that they're gradually running out of material - I'm looking for them to start recycling their Jesse MacBeth stories. Just because the LAT's archives have been purged of their breathless, credulous coverage of his story doesn't mean it can't be resurrected under a phony name (I hear "Scott Thomas" is available again). After all, gotta come up with something, anything, to stop that relentless, virtually terminal slide in circulation.

...needs to put a fold break into this.

indicates that much of the drop in violence is simply due to the success of ethnic cleansing. After a while, there is no one left to kill.

All the numbers seem to me to have gotten us back to January 2006 territory. The style of the insurgency also seems to have gone back to a kind of war in the shadows to hit at the leadership of Iraqi Army, Police, and Concerned Citizens groups. The question now is as to whether or not the momentum that we have now can be sustained once the extra brigades of the Surge have finished their deployments.

The problem, as noted in an earlier comment, is that it's not just two factions that we have to sit down together. It's not just the Sunni and the Shi'a. It's also several different Shi'ite factions, several different Sunni factions, at least two major Kurdish political parties &c. Like I said a few months ago, it's herding rabid cats in the dark.

OTOH, who knows. Sadr's said that he's willing to stand down, and Maliki & Co. appear to be willing to grudgingly (with the U.S. twisting their arm every step of the way) accept local recruits from Sunni areas into the Iraqi Army and Police. I think that the biggest sign of hope is that a lot of the folks in Anbar and the Baghdad exurbs who have signed on with us were, if not eager for the return of al-Douri, definitely sympathetic to the Ba'ath as well as Salafi insurgency. That they're willing to stand down if it means stopping the violence (which appears to have Ba'ath leaders who are talking to reporters angry or in full denial mode) seems to me to be at least a decent sign that if Dawa, SIIC, and the JAM can give some sort of "We promise to quit killing you execution-style in the middle of the night if you accept al-Douri's not returning to power" type of promise, then we might be closer to ending this nonsense than anyone dares hope.

to the political impasse in Iraq. At least not directly.

From the looks of things: Kurdistan is striking off in the direction of de facto independence; Sunni tribal groups and Sunni nationalist groups are vying for dominance/control in different areas, and the Shia are split into overall pro-Iran and not-pro-Iran factions (with perhaps less local rivalry going on than in Sunni areas). The national government, meanwhile, has the mission of reconciling these three groups before the groups are themselves internally reconciled, and so the major questions of the day -- oil sharing, responsibility for security, factional/ethnic tensions, & foreign relations aren't even really being asked in a serious way, much less moving toward answers.

What I'm saying is, nobody has their house in order, and making everyone stop shooting/blowing each other up isn't really going to advance that process. Obviously, it's desirable in its own right and for the sake of ordinary Iraqis to have tangible improvements in security. But the political impasse(s) have yet to work themselves out, violently or otherwise, and restoring security is actually a separate problem from obtaining movement on these issues.

I'm going against a long running truism in saying this (viz. security leads to political compromise), but I'm just thinking aloud and it fits the disjunction I've been seeing between the slow-motion politics of the Green Zone vs. the volatile carnage in the streets.