Marc Lynch deploys his preferred analytic trick of listening to what Arabs are actually saying about things rather than indulging in convenient fantasies. In this edition, Sunni Arab insurgents:

General Petraeus worked creatively and effectively to encourage this trend, and soldiers and diplomats on the ground seem to be aware of the complexities of the new “cooperative” mission. The same can’t be said for surge cheerleaders in the United States. Much of the conventional wisdom about the Sunni areas now seems to come from the impressions formed by politicians and journalists on stage-managed visits to Iraq, or by carefully crafted press interviews with “former insurgents” hand-picked by American military handlers. But we don’t need such a mediated view. Leaders of the major Iraqi Sunni groups actually speak quite often and quite candidly to their own people, though: in open letters, in official statements posted on internet forums, in the Arab and Iraqi press, and in statements released on al-Jazeera and other satellite television stations. What they say in such statements, in Arabic, when addressing their own constituencies, might be considered a more reliable guide to their strategy and thinking. So what are the major Iraqi Sunni leaders saying?

In their literature and public rhetoric, the Sunni insurgency has already defeated the American occupation — which is why the Americans stopped fighting them and came to them for help in fighting al-Qaeda. One discovers virtually nothing in this literature of the American conceit that our forces wore them out or forced them to come to the table. During his meeting with President Bush in Anbar last week, Abu Risha, reportedly joked that his people had achieved in four months what the American military could not achieve in four years. It was one of the few claims made by Abu Risha with which most Iraqi Sunnis would agree, and one which should probably have infuriated more Americans than it seems to have. [...]

Partition, soft or hard, has far fewer fans in Anbar than in Washington. Most Sunnis continue to support a unified Iraqi state, and have exaggerated expectations about the role they should play in such a state. A recent letter from the “Amir” of the Islamic Army of Iraq claimed that Sunnis made up 60 percent of the population of Iraq, and few Sunnis seem ready to accept the status of “tolerated minority” within a Shia-dominated state. [...]

Rather, 72 percent of Sunnis say that the US forces should leave immediately, 95 percent say that the presence of U.S. troops makes security worse, and 93 percent still see attacks on coalition forces as acceptable. Such results should make obvious the vacuity of claims that the turn against al-Qaeda was a victory for American diplomacy.

No reconciliation here.

There’s this stretch of 9th street sort of at the fringes of my neighborhood that’s preposterously littered with vacant buildings. My friend Rob Goodspeed has just put together the closest thing out there to a comprehensive map and listing of the properties. The thing of it is that this isn’t really what you’d call an economically depressed area anymore. The residential blocks surrounding this stretch of ninth street have experienced a lot of getrification, and it runs from the Convention Center to the vibrant U Street in the north (and in particular to a concetration of Ethiopian restaurants and shops) and this part of ninth street ought to be an increasingly thriving retail corridor in the heart of the neighborhood.What to do with these kind of scenarios is troublesome. As Rob wrote several weeks ago:

Despite high demand for both housing and retail, a collection of vacant properties can result in a Catch-22: too many speculators can inhibit investment in a neighborhood meaning few owners make money. Without tenants, the properties decay, attract illegal dumping, are easy targets for graffiti, and a host of other problems.

Basically, if there weren’t so many vacant properties, the odds of the remaining properties staying vacant would go down.

I’ve lifted both of the graphics you’ll see below and the core of the argument from this Ilan Goldenberg post, so all credit for the work is due to him, I just don’t think he made the point as clearly as he should have. To get to the heart of the matter, just take a look at this map that General Petraeus offered as part of his presentation:

That map shows Baghdad awash in sectarian violence in December of 2006, and it shows the violence steadily decline over time until August of 2007, where it’s still certainly a problem but a much reduced one from where it had been before. But notice something funny about the map . . . the color-coding of the neighborhoods as Sunni, Shiite, or mixed stays constant throughout the period even though it’s a period during which we know there was a lot of violence and a lot of internal displacement. What would happen if we showed how the neighborhoods changed over time? Fortunately for us, General Jones prepared maps that did just that for his own presentation:

Jones’ maps show the exact same downward trend in violence as Petraeus’ do. But they also show something else. In particular, they show the disappearance, over time, of mixed neighborhoods with violence, refugee flows, and ethnic cleansing producing a city that’s much more starkly segregated along sectarian lines than it was twelve months ago. In short, the number of incidents is plausibly declining not because of improved security, but simply because there’s relatively little fuel left for the fire. Note in particular that Petraeus shows a large decline in violence between December 2006 and February 2007 which is too soon for the arrival of the surge forces to have made a big difference, but which coincides with the disappearance (shown on the Jones maps) of most of the mixed areas east of the river.