No doubt that good news about Iraq has been hard to come by lately for the administration. The failure of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s offensive against the Shiite militia of Moqtada al-Sadr in Basra and Baghdad still stings, and the postmortems by The New York Times and Washington Post are not pretty. The Times also reports this morning that “more than 1,000 Iraqi soldiers and policemen either refused to fight or simply abandoned their posts” during the fighting last week, a toll that features “dozens of officers, including at least two senior field commanders in the battle.”
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=177580