Tag: foreign service

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Anbar Sheep Culture

Below is from a report by our Ag-Advisor Dennis Neffendorf.  It is more interesting than anything I have going on today, so I am posting it.  Our overall goal is to make the sheep herds healthier, more productive and smaller.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, we estimate that there are at least 1/3 more sheep on the range than the land’s sustainable carrying capacity.

Ironically, low productivity, poverty and inefficiency tend to create a lot more destruction than prosperity.   Poor people tend to be bad stewards of the land because they need to take more desperate measures, like grazing too many low quality sheep, so we think that improving productivity and bringing shepherds more into the market economy is a win for the people, for the counter insurgency and for the environment.

QRF finds an Excellent Process to Train and Assist Sheep Herders in Western Anbar for Wool and Herd Management

Awassi sheep are the economic soul of Western Al Anbar.  There are three sub-breeds in the Al Asad area.  All produce productive lamb and are superbly adapted to the harsh conditions of Iraq’s western desert.  Their fat tail is a key to their survival.  It functions as a reservoir of fat and moisture.  Other breeds have been tried and expensive research was done to try to find a better breed of sheep for the Jazira Desert of Iraq; all have failed.The Awassi has an open face that permits efficient grazing the thorny plants of prickly dry grass.  Beyond that, the sheep can maintain excellent vision for grazing, but the absence of wool in the face allows the animal to maintain a cooler body temperature and adapt to temperatures well above 120 to even 135 degree F in the desert.  They also lack wool on their legs and under stomach, which in addition to keeping the animals cooler also contributes to its tremendous ability to move across the desert.  The tremendous fat tail provides a source of energy for the animal that allows it go for days without eating.  This tails allows the animal to drink water during the day.  Other breeds across the world can not handle the hot desert water.  This unique ability to drink this very warm water the secret is in the tail.

So when a Sheik offers you a piece of prime tail at his home he is offering you one of the finest secrets of the desert to survival of this harsh climate. 

Shearing an art that has been done for many generations, here in Anbar much to everyone’s surprise is still done with swords. Yes indeed swords! These swords are laid along side the belly of the animal and cutting of wool is done in a well designed pattern along the length of the body of the animal.  This process has worked for many years and it sure allows the herder to harvest his wool in parts of Iraq that do not have electricity.  This technique will take the shearer from 30 to 40 minutes to shear an animal and the only maintenance is the sharpening of the swords.  It is a laborious process and wool is mainly used within the confines of the community and not currently taken to textile mills or international buyers and marketers of wool.  The absence of commercial shearing in Western Anbar has created a negative effect on herd condition, health and has impacted the economic potential of the typical sheepherders in Western Anbar.  Without the use of current technology and techniques in wool management, shearing, tagging, grading and marketing of wool has severely degraded not only the economy of the sheepherders family but has further degraded the land resource base of the Jazira Desert.

Quick Response Funds set up by the Department of State provided an avenue for training, providing updated equipment and grading of wool.  Programs like this directly enhance the capacity of the Iraq sheep herders but provide a relationship with local wool producers that produce a friendship that will last for years to come.

The training program will provide hands on experience of shearing and proper use of lister equipment.  Once the wool is shorn, training will also be provided on body condition and fertility of producing ewes.  The wool will be graded out to International Standards to provide a competitive marketable product to textile mills.    Wool has many secondary uses not only the use of lanolin for oil but can also be used as an insulation material for homes and business.  This of course has to be properly processed. 

Sheep are one the few agricultural animals that provide two economic sources of income to the producer.  First the wool and then second a very desirable meat.  Bringing in animals for shearing and tagging allows the opportunity to check for parasites both externally and internally.  The consumption of healthier lambs is also a direct link to the healthier people that consume these meat products.

Other nice positive benefits of overall sheep and wool management is that wool can be shorn and corded to make their own thread, high dollar rugs and clothing material around the home.  It can provide additional household income and many of the handmade products lead to a more comfortable life style and economic growth.

Shearing is an art that takes patience, skill, keeping the lister sharp and not cutting the merchandise to avoid infection and other potential problems.

After the wool is graded and sorted then it goes in the wool bag for marketing.  

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Vanishing Iraq Coverage

I wrote the following letter to the editor of American Journalism Review.  Please follow the links for the original story and this link for the original letter to the editor.

I read your story “Whatever Happened to Iraq?” (June/July) because I am trying to figure out the same thing. Why did the news from Iraq disappear about the time the situation here started to change? I think the problem might be that the American success in Iraq doesn’t fit the earlier defeat-and-destruction narrative that you mention in your story.

I don’t think it is a conspiracy, but it is a syndrome. Journalists like stories that fit their narratives. Once they have found a narrative that other journalists consent to, they are loath to seek disconfirming evidence. My complaint is that the lack of news now has frozen American perceptions in the bad old days of 2006. So much has changed since then. I have seen it in my 10 months here; Marines who were here in 2005 and 2006 tell me that the change is simply unbelievable, which may be why journalists don’t believe it.

The fantastic story, which will probably be told by historians and not current journalists, is that we faced down an insurgency in the center of the Middle East, in a place (Anbar) that al Qaeda had declared the center of its new caliphate. We have driven them to virtual extinction in the course of about a year and did what the pundits and many American politicians said could not be done. Why is that not a story?

Instead, it is big news when the odd bomber gets lucky and kills a bunch of civilians. It is a case of journalists truly missing the forest for the trees.

John A. Matel
U.S. Department of State
Western Anbar, Iraq

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Doing Nothing All Day

Below is part of my bike/running trail.  It follows the old W&OD rail line.  I like to run on that gray gravel.  It is very pleasing to hear the sound of your footsteps and it makes a good base.  The bike trail is a great because it is essentially a very long park.

I spent my second last day at home doing prosaic things.  In the morning, I went running.  It was warm and very humid.  That kind of weather used to bother me, but no more, perhaps because I can always retreat into the air conditioned comfort in the evening.  I enjoy being out in the humidity.  I like the smell of Virginia at this time.  The humidity holds down and accents the various vegetation smells.  The sycamores are especially pungent and I can easily tell the difference between a loblolly and a white pine by smell alone.  I run up the trail and then walk back, so I have time to look at things and think about them. 

At the end of the run is Navy Federal CU headquarters.  They have nice grounds and an old fashioned exercise area.  I like to do chin-ups, but I don’t use the other things, which are kinda lame. 

My neighborhood is being “in-filled”.   When Fairfax County suburbs grew initially, development jumped over my area.  I think it was because there was some light industry and a noisy highway interchange.   Even when they built the subway stop, development lagged.  Now they are making up for lost time.  The picture above is along the running trail.  It used to be a bunch of little dumpy houses.   Now they will be “luxury homes.”  Below is another site for luxury homes not far from the Metro.  IMO they are too big for the average family and they charge too much for them around here.  In a place like Lacrosse or Southside Va these same house would be around 1/4 the cost. They got the land here ready last year, but the lots are not selling as well as they thought.

When we bought our house in 1997, the development was just starting.  Fairfax County has plans to build a town center and allow denser development near the Metro.  That is all to the good, as far as I am concerned. If you have transit, you should have transit oriented development.  Below is a teardown.   There was an old apartment building it will be new condos.

Below is across the street from the demo.  I suppose the new buildings will look like these built a couple years ago.  Progress.

After my run/walk, the boys and I went to Olive Garden for lunch. We talked about things like Victor the Bear.  When I was a kid, they used to bring around a bear called Victor, who would wrestle all comers.  Big guys would try their luck, but Victor always won.  The boys don’t believe me, but it is true.  Espen asked me to cut his hair.  Alex thought he was insane and made reference to my own hair, but Espen persevered.  You see the result, not bad.  Cheaper than a barber and we did it right there on the back deck. I only have three attachments.  It will grow back. 

When Chrissy came home we went to Fudruckers.   As you can see, no great deeds and no great thoughts today, just a nice normal day.  As I prepare to return to Iraq, the normal and uneventful times at home are precious.

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The Worst Hard Time

I just finished The Worst Hard Time about the dust bowl of the 1930s.   Some of what the author describes applies to Iraq.  We get the various different colors of dust and it is almost impossible to get away from it.

Below is the American dust bowl.

The dust bowl was a man-made disaster caused by the plowing up of prairie grass as farmers tried to produce crops which were not suited by nature to the area.   This process was exacerbated by “good luck”.  There was a boom in grain prices caused by WWI and the collapse of grain production in Russia (which had been a big exporter) after the revolution there.   This coincided with some unusually wet weather on the American high plains and during the 1920s times were good, with bumper harvests and high prices.  But later as grain prices dropped (i.e. returned to long term normal), farmers had to put more and more land in production merely to make the same money.  It became a viscous (BTW the original idiom is indeed a viscous not vicious) circle with farmers breaking up the sod to grow more grain and growing more lower the prices and encouraging more sod-busting.   Then the rains stopped.  Subsequent investigation showed that the drought of the dust bowl was not abnormal, but w/o the grass to hold the soil, it blew away.

There is a good PBS series on the Dust Bowl, BTW with a good webpage.

We learned a lot from this experience.   We now have methods that can build or at least maintain soils.  The most important lesson is that you have to work within the bounds of nature and there are some things you just cannot do, no matter how attractive or how much you want it.  The Great Plains have recovered (mostly) from the dust bowl.  Farming there is dry land or irrigated, usually with water from the Ogallala Aquifer, but much has reverted to grassland and many rural counties have never recovered their populations. 

Iraq has a climate like the Texas Panhandle, only hotter.   Anbar gets 4-7 inches of rain in a usual year.  Most of that rain falls in winter.  I saw a couple of good storms and once it rained all day, but the place is a desert.  I wonder, however, how much of desolation is man-made.   The dunes in Anbar are dust and dirt, not sand.   Plants can grow on dirt, if they have a chance.  Unfortunately, people and goats have been working on this place for 4000 years.  It would never be verdant, but how much could be restored?   We have planned and funded some small scale restoration projects.  I don’t know if they will last very long.  Local shepherds have incentives to let their animals devour what they can get, even if it means destruction in coming years.

I had some grandiose dreams when I came to Anbar.   I envisioned a small version of the CCC, an ink blot version.  We have had lots of contacts with local farmers but I don’t know if we have done any lasting good.   The desert will probably swallow up all we do.  Ozymandias leaps to mind.

Above is the Al Asad dust bowl with the duster blowing in

Probably the best thing I did for environment of the desolate region was negative.  We declined to fund “emergency feeding” for the local sheep and goats.   It seemed cruel, but it really would not have helped even in the short run and it would have caused must more destruction and despair even in the medium term.   There are just too many of them for the carrying capacity of the land.  They destroy everything green.  My Ag-Advisor Dennis, who did a lot of his work and growing up in Texas near the old dust bowl, understood the futility – even perniciousness – of the subsidies.  It needed NOT be done. I agreed with him 100%.  We took the hard decision and I am proud of it, although I told him that if they ever make a movie about this, we will certainly be the villains. Sheep and goats are desert making machines, but they are cute.

Anyway, I recommend the book.  About the same time you should also read The Forgotten Man, also about the Great Depression but with a broader perspective.

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Wrapping Up

I will go back to Iraq at the end of this week for my last two months there.  I have been thinking about how I can continue to add value up until the very end.  The two hardest parts of any posting are the first month and the last.   In first month you are overwhelmed trying to learn the new place, the new job and how to work with new colleagues; in the last you are trying to stay relevant, not check-out mentally before you leave physically and continue to plant those seeds you know you will never see germinate. 

Much of my energy will be absorbed by the transition to a new team leader.  It helps that my successor, Robert Kerr, is an experienced diplomat who has already served in Iraq.  We will overlap for at least a week – long enough to pass along my knowledge, but not my bad habits. Beyond that, my team works autonomously.  We all like to think we are indispensible, but I know from experience that soon after we leave a posting we gone like the snows of past winters.   We do our part in our time and when our time is done we do something else.   That does not detract from the importance of our duty.  Each of us is a link in the chain and as the old saying goes, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.  I am gratful that I had the opportunity to do my part.

We need to build on the success given to us by the surge.  We can be grateful that we didn’t listen to the advice of the surge opponents a year ago, but maybe some of their current advice isn’t so bad.   A detailed timeline independent of developing condition in Iraq is just plain stupid, but an aspirational timeline, one that reiterates the U.S. desire to leave, may be a good idea.  

In my corner of Iraq, we have begun already.   The Marines are gradually drawing down.  They are responible for the peace we now enjoy, so leaving is tricky for all sorts of big reasons.  For us, their drawdown has the practical effect of giving us fewer travel assets, i.e. helicopters and convoys.   We also see our Iraqi friends are willing and able to take on more of the responsibility for their own development.  The transition is tricky.  Some of the locals have come to see us as a font of resources.  They think it is easier and better to get us to do something than to ask their own government or do it themselves.  We have to change this attitude and I have been trying to wean them off our largess, at least as pertains to our ePRT.  We don’t do anything w/o a local contribution.  The days of us doing for them are over.  We are currently in the partnership mode and I look forward to the day coming soon when they will do for themselves.  I hope with some U.S. investment and participation, but that will be private.

If we don’t succeed, I worry about the moral hazard.  When people get used to unearned entitlements it leads to dependency and indolence.  Beyond that, they come to despise those giving them the benefit.  Generosity is harder than it seems.  I think it has something to do with reciprocity.   W/o self respect, people cannot respect others and they cannot build self respect if they feel that they are not making a contribution.   Giving w/o expecting anything in return can take away the recipients’ self respect.  Their contribution need not be directly proportional.  It may consist of only the promise to do something for others in the future, but the donor has to insist of something, a contribution – reciprocity.  Otherwise there is a moral hazard that leads to pain for both donor and recipient. 

The old saying that it is more blessed to give than receive is incomplete.   The best for all around is generous reciprocity.

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A Fish Story

Fishermen near Hadithah are pulling bigger fish out of the Euphrates than anybody can remember.   The fish got a chance to be so big because locals had been unable to fish during the late insurgency.  Coalition forces had limited or banned river traffic to prevent terrorists from using the river as transportation and a way to get away.  With the more stable situation, the ban was been lifted, but fishing did not return to its previous levels, despite the size of the fish population.  Why not?

We thought of the obvious reasons, maybe the boats were not in good repair or that people were still afraid to take to the water, but this didn’t seem to be true.  People were fishing, but not so much.  They were fishing for their own or for very local consumption, but not for market.   Then we identified to missing link.  It was not the boats, river, fish, fish markets or fishermen.  The missing link was ice.

Fish are very perishable.  You can catch that big fish, but it is probably not a good idea to buy it or eat it after it has been sitting around in 110 degree heat in the sun all day.  W/o ice, fish mongering is limited to places very near the river where live fish can be maintained.

There was an ice factory nearby, but it was not in operation.  CF helped get it up and running and now fishing is returning.  All this makes our plans to help with fish hatcheries in Anah and Hadithah more urgent, but the hatcheries would have been ineffective and maybe even harmful if the ice problem had not been solved.

The lesson for me was a reminder of bottlenecks and how well the free market works if it is allowed to do so.    We (in this case essentially bureaucratic planners) didn’t think through the whole system.  No planners really can.  That is why the market works so well.  Individuals or groups identify a need and they fill it – IF they can.  The authorities’ role is not to do, but to enable. I think we did the right thing in enabling rather than providing.  Independently, CF are contracting with local firms for ice, rather than making it ourselves, which we are more than capable of doing.   This is helping build an ice infrastructure, which will be in place after we leave.  Ice is a big deal in this hot climate. 

I am glad that we caught on in time.   You accomplish big goals by a combination of applying pushing energy and removing obstacles.  It is tempting just to push harder because you have more ostensible control, but often the obstacle removal is the way to go.  Buying boats & nets, training fishermen etc would have looked good on our reports, but removing the obstacle and letting them do it themselves was the true key to success.

As the old Taoist wisdom advises, the best way to accomplish a task is when the people say, “we did it all by ourselves.”

FYI – In case anybody notices, I am still in the U.S. and this post is out of sequence.  I wrote it a couple weeks ago.  I just forgot to post.  The pictures are old ones too. The top one is fishermen on Lake Qadissya and the one above is Lake Thar-Thar.

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Victory in Iraq Creates Options

The opposite is also true.  Below is the Griffon roller-coaster at Busch Gardens.  It reminds me of our perceptions of Iraq over the last years.

Iraq is getting play in the news again, but the narrative is wrong.   Some commentators – covering for their earlier dumb statements – disingenuously say that we don’t  know what would have happened if we had followed the defeatist advice in 2006 and pulled out instead of surged.   Anybody who has been to Iraq knows that we would be in a big mess today.   The proper answer for the erstwhile surge opponents is to say that they were seriously wrong last year, but that they see the error in light of events and will work with conditions to take advantage of the success brought about by policies they opposed.  I certrainly would not hold their earlier mistakes against them, but I don’t think I will hold my breath waiting for the truth.

The media correctly points out that w/o the Sunni Awakening and the decline of the Shiite militias we would not enjoy the success we do today.  Lots of thing contributed to success.  W/o the surge, however, Al Qaeda would have cut the head off Sunni leaders, as they did in 2005, and the Shiite militias would never have gone into decline.   When you win, you get some of the things you want.  That is what winning means. 

Some people just cannot understand joint causality and that some conditions are indeed necessary but not by themselves sufficient.   I have lived in Anbar for awhile now and met people involved in the Awakening.   They hate Al Qaeda with considerable passion and we certainly could not have defeated the bad guys w/o their help.   But w/o our help, THEY could not have defeated the bad guys either.  Our friends would have been isolated and killed individually or in small groups, along with their families, and others would have been intimidated into silence.   I don’t have to speculate about this.  We saw that such things happened in 2005 and we still could see them happening on a smaller scale even in the time I have been in Iraq.

Let me be as blunt as I can.  The surge worked.   Those who opposed the surge were wrong.  I feel justified in being so nasty because of all the defeatism and negativity we had just a year ago – about the time I was deciding to go to Iraq myself.   I will not accept that those who told people like me that we were stupid for thinking we could win in Iraq – and chumps for volunteering – can now pretend that the success in Iraq would have happened anyway.   

I believe in looking to the future and I don’t dwell on this to justify the past.  Historians can sort out the details in the fullness of time.  But we are still in the midst of this project and we have to keep our eyes on the ball.  AQI and the bad guys are on the run, but they are not defeated.  They are like an infection that has been weakened by penicillin.   We are feeling good now and it is tempting to declare that all is well, but if we stop before the job is done, the disease will return, stronger and more deadly.

The success of the surge is giving us the options of bringing home troops – in victory – and of getting the Iraqis to share more of the burden.   But it is important to remember HOW we got to this point and don’t pretend that it was just luck.

Re Afghanistan –Foreign fighters that until recently headed to Iraq now are on their way to Afghanistan.  Why?  Because they know they are defeated in Iraq.   If WE had been defeated in Iraq in 2006, they would still be going to Afghanistan, but with greater confidence & resolve and in greater numbers.  Iraq and Afghanistan are not the same war, but they are linked.  Al Qaeda & other terror organizations send fighters and bombers to both places.  Foreign terrorists fight us where they think they can hurt us.  That WAS Iraq when we were weaker there.  It may be Afghanistan now because our success in Iraq has made it too hard for the bad guys there.   It could also, BTW, be New York or Washington.   We control them by opposing them.  That is just true.  If we keep the imitative, we have more choices about WHERE we fight them, but we do not have a choice about IF we will fight them.

People who support extremists respond to the same sorts of pressures and incentives as other people.  When being a jihadist is easy and it looks like success is at hand, lots of people want to volunteer or at least be on the winning side.   As it gets harder or more dangerous, this support dries up.   Fighting terrorists does not create more IF it is done properly.  Please see my note from yesterday.  

Extremist ideologies decline only AFTER they have been defeated or discredited.  Nazism didn’t decline by itself.   It went into terminal decline after it was defeated by force of arms.  Until then it looked like the wave of the future.  In 1941 things looked different than they did in 1945.  A similar dustbin of history fate befell Soviet Marxism.  Although in their case it was primarily an economic and political defeat, these forces were backed by forty years of resolve and strength on the part of the U.S. and our allies, without which Soviet communism would have blotted out the sun of freedom over a much wider area for a much longer time.   Why does anybody think extremist jihadists would go away without a fight?  They are standing on the edge of the precipice.  Let’s make sure they fall off.

BTW – when we do succeed in this endeavor, let’s not think it is the end of history.  We went down that path in the 1990s and it didn’t work out. 

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Fresh Air on Counter Insurgency

I recommend a superb interview about Iraq with John Nagl, who helped write the COIN manual.  It is on Fresh Air on NPR.  This program sits on the soft left side of the radio spectrum, which is why this interview is so interesting.  The host obviously is a light-weight compared with Nagl.  You can hear in her voice and demeanor that she knows that too and is impressed with his knowledge.  She really seems to have learned something.  Her questions are sometimes leading and simplistic but his answers make it all work. 

Getting accurate news out on a venue such as Fresh Air is useful.  I suspect that many of the listeners are as badly in need of the education as the show’s host.  The popular stereotype of the Iraq conflict and the people fighting it are out of whack with reality, but too often on shows like this you hear “experts” repeating them in a self-sustaining circle.  A dose of reality will be a breath of fresh air.

Anyway, this is the link to the John Nagl Interview.     

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Practical Anthropology

Below is the Marine Band playing at the Marine Memorial in Arlington.  They play every Tuesday evening during the summer.  I went to see them last week.  The picture is not related to the rest of the post, but I thought it was a good picture. 

I minored in anthropology as an undergraduate.   I don’t think about that much anymore, but an article from AEI reminded me of the usefulness of this sort of outlook.  Anthropologists study cultures and the interrelations within and among them.  This is useful in Iraq and Afghanistan as we try to apply leverage to help those places overcome the damage of insurgencies and terrorism.   I have spoken to anthropologist studying the cultural landscape of Anbar and we are always looking for better ways to understand the people we work with.  We call it “human terrain” and knowing the human terrain is as important as understanding the physical terrain of a battle space.  It saves lives and makes us more successful. It just makes sense.

The article I linked above is about an anthropologist who was recently killed while on duty in Afghanistan.   This guy was a hero.  What surprised me was that some professional anthropologists  disagree.   Some even say it is some kind of ethical violation for anthropologists to use their skills to help with human terrain projects.   I think maybe they have been watching too much Star Trek and they think the prime directive is applicable on our planet. It is one of those examples that shows that you can get a PhD and still remain a fool.

We apply our education – history, anthropology, business etc – to do our jobs better.   It would be unethical not to do so, IMO.  That is one of the purposes of education.  I cannot believe that there is a controversy about this among some academics.   Are they trying to prove that what they teach in the ivory tower really is useless? 

The article I mentioned refers to William Francis Butler who said that a nation that insists on separating its soldiers and its scholars will likely find its fighting done by fools and its thinking by cowards.  In our modern America it looks like we have given fools some of the thinking jobs too.

Social “sciences” such as sociology, anthropology and psychology are not sciences in the precise sense of the term.  That does not mean they are not worth study.  On the contrary, the disciplines used in these fields can help channel thought and help in the art of living life.  But social scientists have no right to stand apart from their societies in a way we might tolerate in a practitioner of a hard science.  Society IS their business.

I studied history & management in school, but I didn’t leave it in the classroom.   Whenever possible, I like to test assumptions and theories in light of actual events in the real world.  Thinking improves action and action improves thinking and the test of a theory is its ability to predict outcomes in the real world. No theory accurately applies to all aspects the real world, but some are better, more predictive, than others and all can be improved in light of experience.   I think that – the real world experience – is what scares some academics.  They want to protect their theories and their phony-baloney status from the intrusion of reality.  That is why they criticize colleagues who participate in reality, no matter what rationalizations they offer.   

The best professors I recall from my studies were those who had worked in business and/or consulted extensively.  They were a lot more reasonable than those who rarely or never ventured out.   But the pure academic types often looked down on experience – silly, but true.  It evidently still applies.  Let’s hope the “purists” are not too strong.

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Welcome Back to the Fight

Barack Obama is going to visit Iraq.   This is a good thing.   He is an honest man.  After he sees for himself the progress we have made, he will have to come around to a more sensible policy on the subject.  Let the dogs of the left howl.  

We have to look to the future.   I get annoyed at all the pea-brained fools who want to relive the events of 2003.  Yes, if we had it to do all over again we would make a different set of mistakes.  I think it was a good thing to get rid of Saddam Hussein, but no matter what our opinions of the past, we live in the here and now.  We can make decisions only in the present that affect the future.  

In the here and now we have an astonishing opportunity.   The next president, Obama or McCain, will have options.  This is what the success of the surge has achieved.  American resolve and courage has given the next president a victory.  The sooner we all recognize that, the better we can build on that success.   We can now withdraw some troops; we can now get the Iraqis to pay for more of their own reconstruction; we can further humiliate Al Qaeda.   These are the things victory gives us.

We achieved this victory because of our perseverance and hard work.  Already I notice that the media is implying that the turn-around (when they even notice it) results from luck or something we could have had w/o all the hardships if only we had been nicer to some of our adversaries.   

Before a big & difficult change, people say it is impossible.  After it has happened, they claim it was inevitable. This is a perniciously silly idea.  Giving up in 2006 would have been a disaster.  If we had relied on the kindness of the Iranians, Al Qaeda or the various regional bad guys we would be bloodied all over the place.   These guys have no history of moderation or generosity.  They stop only when they hit something stronger and more determined than they are.  Americans are generous in victory.   That is what secures peace.  But you cannot be generous until you have something to be generous with.  In other words, you can give peace a chance only AFTER earning it.  

I will be watching the news very carefully.  Lord knows, it will be easy to follow Obama’s progress since he has taken all the network news anchors with him. I eagerly await his turn around in Iraq policy.   I look forward to seeing how it is done.   I expect to learn a lot re spinning.

No matter what, however, it will be a welcome development.  It is sort of like what Viktor Laszlo says to Rick Blaine in Casablanca.   “Welcome back to the fight.  This time I know our side will win.”