That's hardly news, but there's a lot of space inside the definition of "political."

I do seem to recall that back when elections were happening, a government was being created from scratch, and the economic system was being reengineered from the bottom up, that the Enlightened Wisdom was that none of the political stuff was important compared to the violence and security issues. I'm not sure the goalposts are even on the field any more.

It's not hard to prevent street crime with a three cops in body armor authorized to shoot to kill on whim with no accountability on every block, helicopters hovering overhead, 500 pound bombs at the ready. Not hard at all.

This is more mythology. It's obvious that what's been happening since the surge started has more to it than simple military presence. There's no way the pacification of Anbar, for example, was solely due to Coalition suppression of violence. The Sunni Triangle is just too big. The people of that area are the major force in this right now.

You repeat terms like "500 pound bomb" like a mantra, yet you don't know what these bombs actually are, how they're deployed, or anything else about them. Can you tell me the last time such bombs were actually used in Iraq? And where?

It's difficult to discuss this because there's so much information I have to bring people up to speed on, and there's no single "silver bullet" that has created the current decline in violence. You can't say it's all about Sadr calling off his troops, but neither can you say that this has nothing at all to do with it. Same for a dozen other factors, like numbers of troops, new counterinsurgency tactics, cooperation from the population, separation of sects from each other, Iran's changes in involvement, increased Iraqi security force participation, and others.