‘No Victory Dances’

And in Baghdad, too. If you take Mosul and Diyala out, the numbers are really ...
They are very small. And actually, yesterday [Aug. 18], there were 14 attacks in all of Iraq, and that includes crime. That includes everything that we're aware of. And we actually have a much broader appreciation for what's going on because we have—I mean, just in Baghdad alone we have 77 joint-security stations—combat outposts and patrol bases that didn't exist when the surge started.

And then I think unless you've been here, you don't realize the significance of another initiative, and that is that we have reduced our holding of Iraqi detainees by about 5,500 since November. And that's quite significant because they have not been re-arrested ... less than 1 percent. We learned a lot about the detainee business. And the last piece was put in place last fall, which is that you have to conduct counterinsurgency operations inside the detainee facilities just in the same way you conduct them outside. In other words, you have to separate, you have to identify the irreconcilables, the real hard core, and you have to separate them from the rest of the population. In the detainee facilities, when the hard-core Taqfiris were in there, they were training the Terrorist Class of 2008.

In so many ways, it sounds like Al Qaeda in Iraq has been defeated, but the U.S. military is reluctant to say so.
You won't find a single military leader in this theater who will say that.

You could be the first.
Yeah, I could, but I won't be.

But at least can't we say "strategically defeated"?
There's no military leader who will but yeah, you can. We'll leave that to the academics.

I mean, they no longer can …
What we assess is that Al Qaeda in Iraq has been significantly diminished; their capabilities substantially degraded. But we assess that they remain lethal, they remain dangerous. They continue to be, in our view, again, what we call the wolf closest to the sled. Public Enemy No. 1. Now, there have been periods where we focus more on the [Shia] militia, frankly. But after the very significant operations against the militia in Basra, Maydan, Sadr City, elsewhere in Baghdad and so forth, there was the militia ceasefire; there's now the transformation of the militia by Moqtada al-Sadr into an organization that focuses on social services and cultural issues. And there's a wait-and-see about what happens to what used to be called the special group leaders and elements because, as you know, they went back to Iran or a couple went to Lebanon and Syria. And so right now the most significant source of violence in Iraq is Al Qaeda in Iraq and those [handful of] Sunni extremist allies that remain. But they are the ones who are carrying out the suicide-vest attacks, the car bomb attacks and so forth.

Would you agree they now lack any real central organization, and are just a bunch of disparate groups and cells?
Well, they've always had a somewhat cellular structure. They've had varying degrees of command and control; when you had a really strong leader like [Abu Mussab al-]Zarqawi, much more so ... But it still exists. They still have links to Al Qaeda senior leadership in the FATA [Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan]. But those are more tenuous, they have to go to much greater lengths to communicate. And I think it is fair to say that Al Qaeda in Iraq, by and large, is on the run, that its safe havens are considerably diminished.

Mosul and Diyala are the only places where they're really putting up any fight.
Certainly a very significant, tough fight. But the level of violence, even there, is down by over half in Mosul from four months ago. That's an area where they really can't afford to lose the remaining toeholds that they have.

We've heard you've recently intercepted communications from AQI to Al Qaeda senior leaders asking them not to send any more foreign fighters because they couldn't handle them.
They actually stopped the flow, period, for a while, about two months ago. They just said, "Stop bringing in anybody."

And they were focusing on bringing in suicide bombers mostly, rather than actual fighters?
Because they were so disrupted. Yes, they said, "Just stop" … There's a variety of intelligence sources that we have that can sort of corroborate that. Now they've started again, but only about 20 a month.