By listening to the presidential campaign rhetoric or watching the nightly news, one would not guess that the reality on the ground in Iraq is changing.

Security has improved significantly. Last month, for the first time, fewer U.S. troops were killed in Iraq than in Afghanistan. The numbers of Iraqi citizens killed has also dropped markedly, though it remains unacceptably high. This change is clearly reversible but the people in Iraq and in the region are starting to believe in it.

The Carnegie Endowment has come out with their new recommendations for U.S. Policy in the Middle East.  The full PDF of The New Middle East is available HERE.

For those looking for a Neo-Con's guide to Middle East policy, this is not it.

The following is the summary provided by the publisher:

            The Iranian revolutionary cry to ‘liberate’ all lands for Islam and export the revolution was taken very seriously in the wider Middle East, and given Iraq’s majority Shi’a population (under the rule of the Sunni minority), the rhetoric from Tehran was perceived as a direct threat by Saddam Hussein. For his part, Hussein believed that Iran was militarily weak following the revolution and hoped to exploit the situation by attacking the oil-rich Iranian province of Khuzestan. The war, launched by Iraq on 22 September 1980, further radicalized Iranian politics as the Islamic Republic Party (IRP) – the most radical of Iranian political factions – was left at the uncontested helm of Iranian policy-making.