Warning! Everything that follows in this post is idle barstool-though-I’m-still-at-work speculation! So you may have heard that U.S. and Iraqi forces killed Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and Abu Ayyub al Masri, the leadership of al-Qaeda in Iraq, in a joint Sunday raid. If this was 2006, we’d all be freaking out. I might be making an [...]

And good luck with all that. Marc Lynch finds an online treatise — in the spirit of Abu Musab al-Suri — from al-Qaeda in Iraq that tries to own up to What Went Wrong. Short answer: American “propaganda” (not really) and the Awakening (oh yes). This is what it recommends going forward: It then offers [...]