The Coalition has Regained the Initiative

Here are a collection of interesting quotes from a Weekly Standard online blog:

• It's now been nearly eight weeks since the Baghdad Security Operation was first announced, and Baghdad is now relatively calm compared to the security situation just last year. There have been no major mass casualty attacks inside Baghdad since the suicide bombing in the Shia market on March 29.
• The Baghdad Security Plan has resulted in the death or capture of three senior al Qaeda operatives over the past week.
• In Mosul, over 179 insurgents were captured and eight killed during operations over the past week.
• The demonstration in Najaf has been muted. While Middle East Online claimed "hundreds of thousands of Shiites burned and trampled on US flags," the reality is the protest was far smaller than Sadr would have liked. Reuters puts the protest size in the thousands...
• The Coalition has regained the initiative and is taking the fight into the provinces, even though the full contingent of U.S. combat brigades has yet to reach the theater.