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There have been several reports lately about significant progress in Iraq.

No denying that the situation has improved, judging by the reports.

These have come in the form of reports from American soldiers writing home, but also from the change in the attitude of several key democrats from "pull out now" to "we can't pull out now".

Soldiers writing for or against the war are offering their own perspective. I read the positive ones as well as the negative ones like the NYT published (noting the NYT refused to publish the rebuttal from other active-duty in Iraq). I support the troops and it's great to hear from them. Personally, I think we should hear more from all of them, however they stand. The enlisted have free speech rights that officers don't. And I don't know why their service to our country should ever be a foil to silence their First Amendment rights. Officers including retired officers, of course, don't possess the free exercise of those same rights, it's part of being an officer.

I guess I'm saying that I like to read all the anecdotal reports from soldiers. But I think we have to turn to Pentagon sources for the real overall story.

But jveritas' translation shows that morale is poor on the terrorist side, and confirms reports of progress from American soldiers.

Well, it shows that someone posted at a native Iraqi forum a defeatist post, indicate the poster believed al-Qaeda had made many mistakes and was fleeing to Mosul. Whether that was a disinfo post by an al-Qaeda operative or a disinfo defeatist post by someone sitting at a desk at the CIA or NSA, or whether it was an operative of Iraq's intel units or whether it was just an ordinary terrorist sympathizer in Iraq (or elsewhere in the Muslim world), well, we simply have no way of knowing.

You know, we love to bemoan publicly just how helpless we are in human intel in foreign countries. And yet, history shows that we do in fact possess great resources for such intel. But then, don't all the intel agencies pretend to be helpless idiots, incapable of anything? I mean, they are disinformation agencies and try to lull opponents into understimating them.

Wheels within wheels within wheels...

It's very hard for the public to ever know what all these groups are really up to until about 20 years after the fact. And then we never really know everything. The agencies are very good at protecting methods and source even if they appear to have revealed them in their declassified documents. Any attempt by the citizenry to penetrate this world of espionage and propaganda inevitably turns into unverifiable conspiracy-mongering of various sorts (not this post by jveritas but just such efforts in general).

Whether that was a disinfo post by an al-Qaeda operative or a disinfo defeatist post by someone sitting at a desk at the CIA or NSA, or whether it was an operative of Iraq's intel units...

An interesting possibility. Several thoughts:

- a disinfo post made in Arabic would NOT be for the benefit of Americans or the American media. Such a post (if it is disinfo) would be directed at those doing the fighting.
- a disinfo post by AQ that suggests defeat would be counter-productive for AQ. It raises morale for us and brings down morale for them.
- a CIA/NSA disinfo post would only be meaningful if there was some truth behind it for the enemy to accept it.

Even as disinformation, I believe that this post is an indication of significant improvements.

It's quite possible that it's some form of propaganda, but if you ask me, even if this post is a fake, it's hard to believe significant numbers of AQ's aren't actually feeling this way. For one thing, the post's description of what has happened in Diyala and Anbar is accurate regardless of the post's authenticity.

For another, many have to be wondering if the stories about American weakness are true because they've been hearing for at least 2 years that the helicopters-at-the-Saigon-embassy moment should be any day now, yet over 4 years on, the Americans not only won't budge but are adapting and coming after them even harder with more troops, more effective tactics, and with more and more of the locals on their side who never had much use for all these foreign jihadis to begin with.

Another thing to consider is that just as we don't know for certain the origin of this post and thus can't know that it's not propaganda, a lot of AQ operatives with access to the net who might have read it can't be certain of its origin either, so they can't be certain that it is propaganda.

In view of all that, it's unlikely that AQ morale is exactly high right now. So even if the post is fake, unlike Dan Rather, this could be a genuine case of "fake but accurate".