Tigris and Euphrates Update

So we ran the old Statue of Liberty play on al-Sadr et al-Zarqawi et al. First, as pretty much everyone agrees, the transfer of power was never going to have much more than symbolic importance anyway. If bumping it up a couple of days will pre-empt a wave of revanchist attacks, then this constitutes a bit of good news.

But it's not as if the attacks are about to stop. I suppose one of the calculations, aside from getting important people like Bremer the hell out of there before he could become a casualty, was to prevent the awful PR that would have resulted from a major a jihadist offensive simultaneous with the transfer of power. Nevertheless, expect to see headlines like "As Iraqis Assume Sovereignty, Terrorists Strike at Interim Gov't, U.S. Troops." The tragedy is that a heightened frequency and lethality of terrorist attacks is a likely result both of our position in Iraq improving and of its weakening.

Update to the Update:
According to BBC's world report (not exactly the most pro-American news source), the "Iraqi street," for lack of a better term, is energized and optimistic about the handover. We'll see if that sentiment can survive the inevitable Islamo-fascist reprisal killings. But it's important to remember that even symbolic gestures can be significant, and that despite what John Kerry once very accurately called a "fucked up" post-war administration, there are signs, however small, that a bit of optimism could be justified. At the very least, things could be much, much worse (and might still get there).