Iraq updates are best obtained from Iraqi websites, some of which are down. An example from one:

Another group dressed in black in one Daewoo and two Opel vehicles passed the Interior ministry forces' checkpoint at Abu Dshir square, south of Dora, with no resistance and entered the Yassin mosque with explosives in tin containers. The keeper was killed and the mosque blown up.

Iraq the Model is now up with a fresh post that details the actual damage being done. He says it is way overblown. Hamorabi is up and is really laying into the U.S. Ambassador and says he's a Sunni and never should have been sent there. Ham is blaming Wahabis and his overall posts are full of bile. Healing Iraq has best first person account of the chaos and note that he says the Iraqi Police just let things happen, which is what we have always been afraid of. Iraqi Bloggers Central says that the Sunnis have been responsible for all the American and Iraqi dead and now it's "blowback."

There would be no Al Qaeda in Iraq without the support of the Sunnis in the Triangle. And now, my dear lovelies, comes the BLOWBACK. The Sunnis are a minority in Iraq and for thirty years they and their NATIONAL LEADER Saddam Hussein have repressed and tortured and killed the Shia of the south. On top of that, for the last three years the Sunnis have been killing the Shia with the help of Al Qaeda in Iraq, whose hatred of the Shia was spelled out in no uncertain terms by Zarqawi. So how long did you expect the Shia to take it lying down? There's no question now that the Shia have put together hit-squads to take out Sunnis.

Threats Watch has an interesting POV up in that he says the Al Qaeda fear democracy and is losing while getting all the press, that their goal now is to create a new Lebanon of continually warring factions forever.

If Iraq survives this deadly test thrust upon it by the camera magnets of al-Qaeda in Iraq, can anyone possibly deny that this has been a war on a steady - though not unhindered - path to victory without the public ever getting the sense that we and the Iraqi people are and have been winning?

Soldier blogging is non existant, natch, so best read the few Iraqi blogs up and running. Michael Yon, once the best blogger in Iraq, has now fallen in love with himself and nothing is up but hype for his pictures and book. Raed is blaming America and wants us out

When the Iraqi volcano erupts, it won't burn Iraqis. Unlike what the bush administration is trying to promote and claim, Iraqis never had a civil war, and they’ll never have one unless the occupation troops stay in Iraq. The US troops should leave Iraq as soon as possible so that Iraqis would have the time and space to heal their wounds and deal with their internal issues. The US army shouldn't be left in Iraq to face the ire of millions of Iraqis.

Former Spook sees things a little differently seeing the mosque bombing as the Zarqawi Tet Offensive if we allow it to be. He sees Al Qaeda as a fading force because everyone hates them.

If Zarqawi was behind the bombing, then it was tantamount to a "Hail Allah" play from the terrorist handbook. Until this week, the insurgency in Iraq was on a noticeable downswing; the number of "effective" IED attacks had dipped below 10%, and according to Pentagon statistics, the number of U.S. casualties declined in Iraq in 2005. Meanwhile, the Iraqis continue to make significant progress in building a democratic government, and playing a greater role in securing their nation.

Read him, his background is CIA and he has sources. How will this turn out? Who really knows, as in knows, but next week could be a big one.

And then.....it's a weekend and time for reading some serious stuff. Pinkerton has a "crunchy con" serious view of what to do about Iran. Very interesting.

But the read of reads this weekend is Lee Harris's "On the Brink" which is realistically scary about Iraq. I have posted many times on this blog that the real power in Iraq is the tribes and tribal loyalties.

Iraq, in short, is not on the brink of a civil war, as we understand it from our own experience; rather it is on the brink of something that no American, based on his own experience of civil life within his nation, can possibly hope to grasp in its full horror -- namely, tribalist anarchy.

My first posting about tribes, which was in June of '04, is HERE. I did another very long post about the similarities between incestual relationships and tribal reward system, HERE and I concluded with the observation that it was the Magna Carta in England that started the west on the road to democracy, not the Enlightenment, the journey down that long road from Magna Carta to an eventual working democracy took 500 years. We expect the tribally centered Iraqis to take the journey in 500 days. And don't forget the always thought provoking VDH at NRO, he's hitting a triple to right today.

....the question now is an existential one: Can the United States — or anyone — in the middle of a war against Islamic fascism, rebuild the most important country in the heart of the Middle East, after 30 years of utter oppression, three wars, and an Orwellian, totalitarian dictator warping of the minds of the populace? And can anyone navigate between a Zarqawi, a Sadr, and the Sunni rejectionists, much less the legions of Iranian agents, Saudi millionaires, and Syrian provocateurs who each day live to destroy what’s going on in Iraq? The fate of a much wider war hinges on the answers to these questions