Up Your OODA

Over at toohotfortnr Spencer Ackerman puts Bill Kristol’s most recent and thirty-second declaration of Victory in Iraq in perspective.

To get jargony, what happened this year is that Petraeus got all up in their OODA loop, which makes him the first U.S. commander to have done so. But there was never any reason to believe that would be permanent — hence the reason why Gaskin is the only general ever to have used that word in public. The suicide bombings are an indication that the insurgent groups and al-Qaeda in Iraq are shifting their loop up. Now it becomes a question of U.S. counterresponse, shaped by available capabilities. But we’ve passed the high-water mark of U.S. capabilities: the surge brigades will be gone by the spring-summer, owing to the unyielding reality of military overstretch, and Secretary Gates has spoken of bringing 40,000 troops total home by July. Continuing the current strategy will require doing way more with significantly less.

New York Times:

Thirty people were killed Tuesday when a suicide bomber strode into a gathering of mourners at a home in eastern Baghdad and detonated an explosives-packed vest, the Interior Ministry said. It was the most brazen and deadly attack in the capital in months.

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The attack in Baghdad followed the gruesome abduction and killing of five relatives on Tuesday morning in Jalawla, a village northeast of Muqdadiya in Diyala Province. One of the five killed was a policeman, an Iraqi police official in Diyala said.

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Though far fewer civilian deaths have been reported in the last five months than the same period in 2006, recent civilian casualty trends track closely with late 2005, before the bombing of a Shiite shrine enveloped the country in a brutal sectarian war.