Clearly the big news in this story relates to the bombings, but an interesting B plot begins here:

Officials released two seized documents they said were handwritten by members of the group, in despair about defections and decreasing popular support.

The article then goes on to describe the contents of those documents as supporting that official interpretation and then notes that:

The military, citing security concerns, released only excerpts of the two documents.

Of course they are. It couldn’t be that the documents were released primarily for domestic propaganda purposes but that making them effective propaganda required some editing, thus leading to the excerpts only policy.

I will say, though, that there does seem to be a ray of genuinely good news lurking about. The anti-”Awakening” forces appear to have decided that operations resulting in large numbers of Sunni Arab civilian casualties are counterproductive and have focused on attacking Awakening fighters and police instead. That should make continued combat somewhat less deadly, which counts as a small mercy.

I think absolutely everything Defense Secretary Robert Gates is trying to say to European leaders about the central importance of NATO’s mission in Afghanistan and the need for Europe to do more is correct. But what Gates needs to recognize is that realistically it’s going to be hard to accomplish very much on this front until the United States puts some distance between itself and the Iraq War. Both politically and strategically, a deep European investment in Afghanistan just isn’t going to be forthcoming as long as the U.S. remains politically and strategically invested in a hare-brained scheme to conquer the Persian Gulf.

My guess would be that Gates recognizes this on some level. But if he does, he needs to communicate that fact to George W. Bush and the other people who make the decisions.

Anbar Awakening forces and the official security services of Iraq appear to be going at it in Diyala.

Now as long as neither of these contenders are shooting at US troops, which neither of them seem to be, that’s fine for us as long as you think an indefinite occupation of Iraq serves American interests. But that’s what this is about. We’re not preventing civil conflict in Iraq, or helping the Iraqis to build a coherent state.