Gen. Ray Odierno, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, called the successful raid “potentially the most significant blow to al-Qaeda in Iraq since the beginning of the insurgency.” Well, military leaders said the same thing after the June 2006 killing of al-Masri and al-Baghdadi’s predecessor, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and the insurgency intensified for another year, requiring the abandonment of al-Qaeda by Iraqi Sunnis, the successful ethnic cleansing of Baghdad during the broader sectarian war and the U.S.’s shift to a counterinsurgency strategy to tamp down violence beginning in late summer 2007. Odierno’s boss in that latter effort, Gen. David Petraeus, issued a more measured statement:

The deaths of these two leaders represent significant blows against extremism in Iraq. While we recognize that AQI retains the capability of carrying out periodic extremist attacks, Iraqi leaders have vowed to press the fight against Al Qaeda and its affiliates in Iraq. In accordance with the Iraq-U.S. Security Agreement, U.S. forces will continue to assist and enable our Iraqi partners in that effort.

Update: Vice President Biden’s formulation echoes Odierno’s:

Their deaths are potentially devastating blows to al Qaeda Iraq. But equally important, in my view, is this action demonstrates the improved security strength and capacity of Iraqi security forces. The Iraqis led this operation, and it was based on intelligence the Iraqi security forces themselves developed following their capture of a senior AQI leader last month.

[buttons] Sadiq Rikabi, one of Maliki’s closest political advisers, was in town for a recent U.S.-Iraq business expo. His problem: as much as he praised the “real American commitment” to military withdrawal, the focus on withdrawal “gives the wrong message that the U.S. will leave Iraq, [will] no longer stand beside Iraq,” allowing unnamed neighbors (but meaning Iran and Saudi Arabia) to “play internal Iraqi politics.” He wants to ensure the U.S. “stands with Iraq in the diplomatic field, the political field” and economically while sending the message that withdrawal is the result of “implementing an agreement between two countries,” not the end of the relationship. (A message that, apparently, the Obama administration has not sufficiently sent.)

When I asked him what political developments inside Iraq the outside world might be neglecting, Rikabi gave the anodyne answer that we should “focus on the democratic process itself” and not who wins or loses. That would be lovely — if Iraq could agree on an election law. On the contentious issue of the multi-ethnic city of Kirkuk — whose undetermined status as either a Kurdish or an Arab-controlled city is a factor in the delay — Rikabi said that Kirkuk “should participate in the elections” with the rest of the country. He added that Maliki, President Jalal Talabani (one of the Kurdish leaders) and Parliamentary Speaker Ayad al-Samarrai had “reached such a compromise” on the issue of timing the elections, which will “hopefully then will be taken up by the parliament.”

A few hours later, across town, Mohammad Salman, the head of the Implementation and Follow-up Committee for National Reconciliation — Maliki’s main organ for healing Iraq’s sectarian divides — gave a talk to a small gathering at the U.S. Institute of Peace. I got there a bit late, so I missed what I’m told was an undetailed and bland assurance that the integration of the former insurgent militias known as the Sons of Iraq was going well. He praised the creation of 210 so-called tribal support councils around Iraq, with the participation of 5,000 sheikhs, to redress sectarian concerns with the government. Similarly, he emphasized a program to resettle Iraq’s millions of displaced persons — those who were removed during the sectarian cleansing of 2005-6 — in Baghdad and Diyala Province, which includes what he described as a robust jobs program for people who move back home.

Unlike Rikabi, Salman worried openly that the election might not happen on time, and said one of the greatest dangers to Iraq over the next several months would be the prospect of the government continuing on an emergency basis without legal authority if the election is delayed, or if the results are refused. He expressed confidence that the sectarian reconciliation efforts he oversees would continue into the next government, but cautioned (through translation), “We are not an institutional country.”

One thing that caught my attention was Salman’s assurances that the resettlement of displaced persons depended on people presenting documentation of owning their original homes. Were there problems with people claiming homes with insufficient documentation? After all, people ordered by a death squad to leave or be murdered may not have the presence of mind to grab their deeds. Salman, through his team of translators, said he was primarily seeing that problem manifest itself in Diyala, where 12,000 claims on property have been filed, but “we believe these claims are exaggerated,” and in some cases multiple people claim the same home. The reason is that Iraq tends to keep better records in cities like Baghdad than it does agricultural areas like Diyala, which was a prime battleground in the sectarian conflict.

“Diyala is difficult,” Salman conceded, and he was “trying to figure it out.” Like much of Iraq.

Still, for years the Shiite-led Iraqi government, which has a great deal of antipathy toward the anti-Iranian organization, has wanted access to the MEK facility. The United States has resisted, for a variety of reasons. One of those reasons is that the military feared the Iraqi security forces would abuse the camp’s inhabitants. And today, in an evident exercise of sovereignty under the Status of Forces Agreement, Iraqi police breached Camp Ashraf and ran wild. The Washington Post has what it claims to be video from inside the camp. It’s ugly.

The Post quotes an MEK member saying the camp is currently “under siege.” Defense Secretary Bob Gates visited Iraq today. Does Gates know about this? Could he stop the assault? Or are these the wages of Iraqi sovereignty?

Juan — who, to be clear, doesn’t call me out or reference my stuff — suggests that Maliki’s comments may be blown out of proportion:

The headlines this admission generated in US news sources about ‘US troops may stay’ are a little puzzling to me, and seem actually sensational. What al-Maliki explicitly said was that Iraq may ask for a handful of trainers to stay. He is not saying that the US military will be rolling tanks in Iraqi cities in 2012.

I’ll trust you guys to tell me if I’m being sensational, and I didn’t think I was. I would say, though, that Maliki didn’t “explicitly” say he was open to a “handful of trainers.” He said, “if Iraqi forces required further training and further support, we shall examine this at that time [after 2011] based on the needs of Iraq.” Now, my read is similar to Juan’s, meaning that Maliki certainly didn’t say that he’d be open to U.S. combat forces in Iraq after 2011.

But this was (a) the first time Maliki publicly acknowledged any post-2011 U.S. troop presence and (b) he didn’t specify the size of that presence, and because (c) training/advisory missions can also be nebulous and open-ended, it struck me that I should report that story, and report it in the way that I did. I did not write and I (hopefully) didn’t imply that Maliki was opening the door to an endless occupation, because that certainly wasn’t what he said, but there’s sufficient and sufficiently-meaningful middle ground between All Troops Out and All Troops In that makes his comments worth reporting. Additionally, Maliki’s comments are likely to prompt responses from other politicians in Iraq, particularly ahead of January’s election. So, respectfully, I don’t see this as a nonstory.

“It would also appear to indicate that Prime Minister Maliki’s confidence in the Iraqi Security Force’s ability to handle security on their own is in doubt. He is not completely confident of their ability to handle security on their own.”

Also in Eli’s story, John Nagl of the Center for a New American Security is surprised only by the fact that Maliki said this before the January elections.

And don’t miss Maliki’s answer to Eli’s question about the recently-released prisoner Laith Qazali, a Shiite terrorist whom the U.S. military accused of planning the murder of five soldiers in 2007.

I would like to convey our most sincere condolences to the friends and families of each of those that have fallen in Afghanistan. Our thoughts and prayers are with them and their families. They are heroes and their valiant sacrifices are not in vain, and they will each be remembered for their distinguished service and valor in this fight for a noble cause.

I excerpted Jawad’s statement because it’s four paragraphs long. By contrast, in his speech today to the U.S. Institute of Peace, here’s the closest Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki came to recognizing the fact that over 4,300 U.S. troops have died in Iraq:

He extended his thanks to “the international community and all the countries that have cooperated and helped Iraq,” saying Iraq would enjoy a “solid relationship with a great and strong country like the United States.”

The U.S. invaded Iraq in an unprovoked preemptive war, and the chaos that followed makes it very understandable — if painful to American ears — why an Iraqi head of state who called it a “great victory” when U.S. troops withdrew from his towns and cities wouldn’t extend much praise to U.S. forces. Obama said Maliki intends to lay a wreath at Arlington National Ceremony honoring fallen U.S. troops, which is a meaningful and respectful gesture. Still, the two statements underscore the difference in perceptions of U.S. partnership between Afghans and Iraqis.

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A lot was made — both in Iraq and in the United States — of Vice President Biden’s recent admonition to the Iraqis that unless they made progress on sectarian reconciliation, they shouldn’t count on consistent U.S. aid. Some saw it as a necessary bit of pressure; others considered it a contradiction of last year’s Strategic Framework Agreement, a document that spells out the terms for a post-occupation partnership. O’Sullivan, writing in The Washington Post, sees rhetoric that’s frozen in the bad old days of — well, of her tenure as White House Iraq director:

[T]he reality is that Iraq’s most difficult problems are primarily about substantive issues. Iraqis and their leaders are divided on fundamental questions about the nature of the state — specifically, whether the locus of power should be in Baghdad or in the provinces. Should Iraq be a more traditional Arab state, where power is centralized in the capital? Or should the regions and the provinces — i.e., the [Kurdistan Regional Government] — have substantial authorities and autonomy?

She has a point. During the political maneuvering following the provincial elections earlier this year, the sectarian dynamics in Iraq began to scramble for the first time since the political architecture set up by the U.S. occupation inadvertently entrenched a Sunni-Shiite-Kurdish division. It’s not as if Iraq is in a post-sectarian phase yet. But identity questions are no longer the decisive questions about Iraqi politics the way they were when O’Sullivan — generally considered one of the more reality-based of Bush’s Iraq aides — was in the White House. (There’s not a lot of self-reflection in her op-ed about how the Iraq policies she helped shape contributed to the sectarianism she urges the Obama administration to see beyond; but get used to that from former Bush officials.)  And with new national elections coming up, it makes sense to treat substantive politics as more important than those identity questions.

Vice President Biden has arrived in Iraq to visit U.S. troops and to meet with Iraqi leaders, including President Jalal Talabani, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and Speaker of the Council of Representatives Ayad al-Samarrai. The Vice President will reiterate the United States’ commitment to fully implement the Security Agreement and the Strategic Framework Agreement and to carry out President Obama’s plan to draw down U.S. forces. He will discuss with Iraq’s leaders the importance of achieving the political progress that is necessary to ensure the nation’s long-term stability. This is Vice President Biden’s second trip to Iraq this year and his first as Vice President.

Biden has long experience dealing with and strategizing over Iraq’s sectarian political deadlocks. The trouble is that non-Kurdish Iraqis consider his major proposal for an Iraqi political compact — a plan to decentralize Iraq to the point of creating significant regional autonomy — to be offensive. Juan Cole had a good roundup of this last year when President Obama tapped Biden for the VP slot. Clearly, the Iraqis will deal with Biden with the respect due a high-level American emissary, but it would be interesting to see whether there’s any sub-rosa animosity toward someone they once regarded as trying to break up their country.

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But not if you’re an Iraqi. Just read the outpouring that The Washington Post reports for the end of a major U.S. presence in the cities and the towns:

“Out, America out!” a group of sweat-drenched young men chanted Monday at a Baghdad park as the sun was setting. They jumped up and down to the deafening beat of drums and the wail of horns.

It’s a “carnival” in Baghdad, according to The Post’s Ernesto Londono, filled with Iraqi troops grinning as they take their lives into their own hands and graffiti writers further south demanding, “Pull your troops from our Basra, we are its sons and want its sovereignty.” Don’t tell them today is just another day.

Building on the political opportunity afforded by today’s national celebration, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki declared victory, reports The New York Times:

“The national united government succeeded in putting down the sectarian war that was threatening the unity and the sovereignty of Iraq.”

Adds reporter Alissa Rubin, “He made no mention of the American military’s involvement in fighting here for the last six years.” If you were Maliki, would you? Rubin also notes that the government turned American reporters away from the Green Zone — the former U.S. enclave now under Iraqi control — in an apparent gesture “to signal that the Iraqi authorities were in charge.”

To which I’d only add that Iraqi Prime Ministert Nouri al-Maliki’s rhetoric, designed to keep himself in power after the upcoming national election, is predicated on portraying himself as the guy who ends the U.S. occupation. It’s a pretty good barometer that the most rational position to take as an Iraqi politician is anti-occupation. Too often U.S. discussions of Iraq — even now, when few people seem to care about Iraq — fail to take into account Iraqi perspectives or act as if what the Iraqis think is an obstacle to be overcome, instead of the basis of a rational policy.