We've always been winning in Anbar.

Putz added to his ludicrous "you'd think lefty bloggers would be happy if things were going badly in Iraq" post.

I'm starting to think that they don't follow the news all that closely. It's true -- as Michael Yon noted in an earlier email -- that Anbar isn't perfectly peaceful. But it's also true that it's changed quite drastically since it was being written off last year. That's news -- if you care about reality, rather than just rooting for America Bush to lose.

What, no "nanny-nanny-boo-boo"?

Here's the problem: Putz has been insisting we've been winning in Anbar for three years. Read these posts and decide who it is doesn't follow the news or care about reality.

10/6/06

Don't let the media convince you that things are going badly in Iraq. The Anbar tribes are now fighting al Qaeda on their own initiative, and the Shi'ite-dominated government is slowly dismantling al Sadr's Mahdi Army...Our strategy in Iraq is sound. It's keeping our own casualties down, and it's forcing the Iraqis to defend themselves.

Don't despair. We're winning.

10/5/06

ED MORRISSEY looks at events in Anbar province, and observes: "The tribal backlash shows why the Zarqawi strategy was always a loser."

10/2/06

A GROWING INSURGENCY in Iran?
UPDATE: Plus, a look at Anbar tribes vs. Al Qaeda from Bill Roggio.

9/22/06

STRATEGYPAGE OFFERS A RATHER POSITIVE TAKE on what's going on in Anbar province.

9/21/06

Good work has been and continues to be done in Anbar. The military has a problem with public affairs, plain and simple, and fails to realize that the impact on remaining silent on this report far outweighs the need to keep the information classified.

1/27/06

IRAQ THE MODEL: "Iraqi tribes in Anbar arrest 270 Arab and foreign al-Qaeda members!"

9/04

If the pattern of American casualties shows that most fighting is happening in Al-Anbar it is not because Administration officials are manufacturing the results to camouflage a "widening insurgency". It is because there is no power vacuum among Kurds and Shi'ias as complete as that in the Sunni triangle. Civil war, if it eventuates, will not be result of military failure but from a lack of commitment to create a replacement Iraqi State. If we build it, it will come.