Required reading:

On the uptick in deaths in Anbar: The Anbar Problem No One is Talking About. The deaths further reveal the Sisyphean nature of our task in Iraq.

The consequences of our reliance on mercenaries: Iraq Contractor in Shooting Case Makes Comeback. Last year, Blackwater massacred Iraqi civilians. Now, they’re back in business without so much as a slap on the wrist. The reason they got their contract renewed was that we had no other choice. We have a dangerous reliance on mercenaries. This needs to end.

Truce in Sadr City?: Outlines of a Truce for Sadr City. The thing that pisses me off is that fighting has been going on for over a month, and yet this has not dominated the news cycle. Of course, this is not surprising given that our media has become a propaganda factory for the US government.

Glenn Greenwald is sharp, as usual, detailing and criticizing the Pentagon’s illegal domestic propaganda program and how our media is complicit in all this. Read both this entry, CNN, the Pentagon’s “military analyst program” and Gitmo, and this entry, How the military analyst program controlled news coverage: in the Pentagon’s own words.