Iraqi Army Takes Last Basra Stronghold

The current pea-brained wisdom of the Democrats and their lackies in the mainstream media is that Iraq is still a hopeless quagmire because the Iraqi government can’t get its act together militarily and politically.

Hillary says that “we cannot win” the Iraq war. Obama (blessed be the Messiah) says that the Iraq picture is beginning to come into focus and that current events prove him right that we never should have gone to Iraq in the first place. Maybe Larry and Curly should read Sunday’s New York Times.

BAGHDAD — Iraqi soldiers took control of the last bastions of the cleric Moktada al-Sadr’s militia in Basra on Saturday, and Iran’s ambassador to Baghdad strongly endorsed the Iraqi government’s monthlong military operation against the fighters.

By Saturday evening, Basra was calm, but only after air and artillery strikes by American and British forces cleared the way for Iraqi troops to move into the Hayaniya district and other remaining Mahdi Army militia strongholds and begin house-to house searches, Iraqi officials said. Iraqi troops were meeting little resistance, said Maj. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, the spokesman for the Iraqi Interior Ministry in Baghdad.

Despite the apparent concession of Basra, Mr. Sadr issued defiant words on Saturday night. In a long statement read from the loudspeakers of his Sadr City Mosque, he threatened to declare “war until liberation” against the government if fighting against his militia forces continued.

But it was difficult to tell whether his words posed a real threat or were a desperate effort to prove that his group was still a feared force, especially given that his militia’s actions in Basra followed a pattern seen again and again: the Mahdi militia battles Iraqi government troops to a standstill and then retreats.

Why his fighters have clung to those fight-then-fade tactics is unknown. But American military and civilian officials have repeatedly claimed that Mahdi Army units trained and equipped by Iran had played a major role in the unexpectedly strong resistance that government troops met in Basra.

Note that the brilliant New York Times reporter first quotes an Iraqi general as saying that Iraqi troops met with little resistance then goes on to say, without sourcing, that the Iraqi troops had met with “unexpectedly strong resistance” in Basra. Here’s a video of the “unexpectedly strong resistance” that our troops encountered.