A Canadian caller from Ottawa alerted me to an upcoming vote of no-confidence in their parliament on Monday morning. He predicted the governing Liberal party would lose that vote. Sure enough, he was right.

Seymour Hersh has another article in the New Yorker about the Iraq War. He paints George W. Bush as an increasingly isolated, religious fanatic who will not withdraw our troops from Iraq until the job is done. He also writes about the problems associated with possibly allowing Iraqis to use American airpower in the campaign against the insurgency. Whatever you think of Hersh, he is always a good read.

Mark Steyn says the people of Britain need to wake up and hear the Muezzin.

Vodkapundit has the latest U. S. military recruiting numbers. It looks like the active forces are hitting their targets.

More Iraqi troops are in the fight, according to the Washington Times. It appears that the Pentagon, after two years of trying different strategies, may have finally hit upon something that will work. They may just be at the cusp of having enough troops to secure Iraq (because of the addition of the Iraqi troops). Joe Lieberman certainly thinks that is the case.

The leaders of America's military and diplomatic forces in Iraq, Gen. George Casey and Ambassador Zal Khalilzad, have a clear and compelling vision of our mission there. It is to create the environment in which Iraqi democracy, security and prosperity can take hold and the Iraqis themselves can defend their political progress against those 10,000 terrorists who would take it from them.

Does America have a good plan for doing this, a strategy for victory in Iraq? Yes we do. And it is important to make it clear to the American people that the plan has not remained stubbornly still but has changed over the years. Mistakes, some of them big, were made after Saddam was removed, and no one who supports the war should hesitate to admit that; but we have learned from those mistakes and, in characteristic American fashion, from what has worked and not worked on the ground. The administration's recent use of the banner "clear, hold and build" accurately describes the strategy as I saw it being implemented last week.

We are now embedding a core of coalition forces in every Iraqi fighting unit, which makes each unit more effective and acts as a multiplier of our forces. Progress in "clearing" and "holding" is being made. The Sixth Infantry Division of the Iraqi Security Forces now controls and polices more than one-third of Baghdad on its own. Coalition and Iraqi forces have together cleared the previously terrorist-controlled cities of Fallujah, Mosul and Tal Afar, and most of the border with Syria. Those areas are now being "held" secure by the Iraqi military themselves. Iraqi and coalition forces are jointly carrying out a mission to clear Ramadi, now the most dangerous city in Al-Anbar province at the west end of the Sunni Triangle.

Nationwide, American military leaders estimate that about one-third of the approximately 100,000 members of the Iraqi military are able to "lead the fight" themselves with logistical support from the U.S., and that that number should double by next year. If that happens, American military forces could begin a drawdown in numbers proportional to the increasing self-sufficiency of the Iraqi forces in 2006. If all goes well, I believe we can have a much smaller American military presence there by the end of 2006 or in 2007, but it is also likely that our presence will need to be significant in Iraq or nearby for years to come.

As I said in a previous post, if we withdraw prematurely we will be snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.