The American media has forgotten that there are countries to the east of Pennsylvania, home of the April 22 primary.  The marginalization of the Iraq debacle is expected, since in many ways the media wants to obscure their own failures in the run-up to the invasion in the first place.  If they manage to re-open any foreign bureaus, perhaps they'd like to pay some attention to a story of 80,000 angry Sunnis threatening to strike and reduce Iraq to total chaos.

Kevin Drum highlights this story about the problems with the strategy behind "The Surge™!"'s supposed success.  The CLC's or whatever else you may call them are simply the latest extension of the "death squad option" so openly announced more than three years ago by the Pentagon.  Back then, it meant supporting local militias that were supposedly friendly.  Beginning last year, it meant throwing wads of cash at people, even if they have American blood on their hands, hoping they'll be nice for a while.

The coverage of Iraq has been overwhelmingly positive as of late, and the levels of bloodshed are dropping. A lot of the improvement has been attributed to the Awekening movement (al Sahwa in Arabic), which is a political assumption of power by tribal sheikhs in the lawless provinces. Then the emphasis shifted on a new armed force that was battling al Qaeda and making Iraqis safer. They go by many names, but the most recent monkier has been the Concerned Local Citizens or CLCs in military jargon.  The informaiton available from the Pentagon about these formationt is limited. The number reported for them most recently is 77,000, 192 independent groups. The Shiite central government, which has protested the formation of these units repeatedly, fears these groups because they are mostly Sunni and view the centeral government as a stooge for either the Americans or the Iranians (depending on their mood).

After the fold, I have assembled some good links to give the readers a nice overwiew of the development of this phenomenon, and of its counterparts in Afghanistan and Pakistan.