It was both encouraging and informative to watch this video from Michael Totten.

Join me and Army Captain Phil Messer on a walking tour of Ramadi, Iraq, in a 20 minute video shot during a dismounted foot patrol in early August, 2007.

If you value to work of these embeds and their ability to relay to us honest, personal experiences from Iraq, please consider dropping even a dollar in their kitty.

Michael Totten’s latest dispatch from Iraq deals mainly with various police forces inside the country. It is interesting that in moving from one province to another, not only are the matters of safety unique to one another but the scenery and cleanliness seem to be very distinct.

In late July when I visited a police station in the town of Mushadah just north of Baghdad I worried that Iraq was doomed to become the next Gaza. As many as half the police officers, according to most of the American Military Police who worked as their trainers, were Al Qaeda sympathizers or agents. The rest were corrupt lazy cowards, according to every American I talked to but one. No one tried to spin Mushadah into a success story. By itself this doesn’t mean the country is doomed. How important is Mushadah, anyway? I hadn’t even heard of it until the day before I went there myself. But Military Police Captain Maryanne Naro dismayingly told me the quality of the police and their station was “average.” That means one of two things. Either Mushadah is more or less typical, or roughly half the Iraqi Police force is worse.

I had a much better experience when I embedded, so to speak, with the Iraqi Police in Kirkuk. I trusted the Iraqi Police in that city enough that I was willing to travel with them without any protection from the American military, even though Kirkuk is still a part of the Red Zone. Kirkuk, though, is an outlying case. The Iraqi Police there are Kurds. The Kurds of Iraq are the most pro-American people I have ever met in the world. They are more pro-American than Americans. There is no Kurdish insurgency, and the only Kurdish terrorist group – Ansar Al Islam, which recently changed its name to Al Qaeda in Kurdistan – is based now outside a town called Mariwan in northeastern Iran. The Iraqi Police in Kirkuk may be corrupt, but they aren’t terrorists or insurgents.

Michael’s detailed reporting is far superior to that which we receive through most major publications. Up close, truthful and personal is a great combination for delivering the message, whether it be positive or negative.

These embeds are dispatching some great photography also and this post is no exception.

If you want to read the unfiltered truth about what is going on in Iraq you should be a regular reader of Michael Yon and Michael Totten, along with the other milbloggers.

These men are actually in Iraq and in the middle of the battles. They tell it the way it is and not what some newspaper wants you to think.

From Michael Totten’s Anbar Awakens Part I:

Some in the United States are unconvinced that Al Qaeda was really at the center of the conflict in Anbar. So I asked Colonel John Charlton how the Army knows Al Qaeda is really who they have been dealing with. He was supremely annoyed by the question.

“We know it’s Al Qaeda,” he said. There is no controversy whatsoever about this in Iraq. My question seemed to him as if it had come from another planet. “They self-identify as Al Qaeda. We didn’t give them that name. That’s what they call themselves. We have their propaganda CDs which have Al Qaeda written all over them.”

It’s not a dumb question, though, if a substantial number of Americans aren’t sure what’s going on in a bottomlessly complicated country eight or more times zones away. And not everyone who underestimated Al Qaeda’s presence is a fool.

I briefly met Army Reserve Lieutenant Colonel Eric Holmes from Dallas, Texas, while he was on his way home after volunteering to serve in Ramadi for six months. “I didn’t realize until I got here that the problem in Anbar Province was 100 percent Al Qaeda,” he said. “The old Baath Party insurgency here is completely finished. That war was won and Americans, including me, had no idea it even happened.”

Part II is here.

Here’s a quote from Part II which explains more than I can why I trust his dispatches more than the major newspapers’ or networks’ reporting:

Violence has declined so sharply in Ramadi that few journalists bother to visit these days. It’s “boring,” most say, and it’s hard to get a story out there – especially for daily news reporters who need fresh scoops every day. Unlike most journalists, I am not a slave to the daily news grind and took the time to embed with the Army and Marines in late summer.

I encourage you to read his dispatches, and if, as someone has said, they don’t care if all of them get killed then look at the photos of the beautiful children and tell me that.

If you want independent journalism about what’s going on in Iraq, including mistakes we have made in the past, you can’t go wrong reading either of these two bloggers or the milbloggers.

They have no political agenda the way the major news operations do and you get the honest truth.

Not only do I encourage you to read the dispatches, but if you are a skeptic I dare you to read them and come back and tell me it’s all sugar-coated.

Look at the photos and say you don’t care if these people die. If you can still say that after reading the dispatches and seeing the photos you must have a cold heart indeed.

Michael Totten has posted another terrific piece.

This time the take is a bit different as he shows how our military is garnering some of their intelligence in Iraq. A fascinating read with lots of human elements.

The night was reasonably cool for Baghdad in the summer. The temperature rarely drops below 100 degrees Fahrenheit before midnight, but this night it felt like a cool 90 by ten p.m.

Plastic lawn chairs were arranged in a circle on the grass. I expected a relaxing evening of important conversation in comfort. The lawn chairs, though, were not for us. The owner of the house said we should have our meeting inside.

“He owns a store,” Lieutenant Pitts said to me on the way in. “He sells us phone cards and stuff at the right price, not at a jacked up rate. We call his store Wal-Mart.”

Inside the house was brutally hot. The lights were on, but the air conditioner was off. The fierce heat of the day couldn’t escape into the atmosphere like it could in the yard. If we were in the U.S. I would have suggested we sit outside, but I was the stranger and a mere observer in a foreign land and was not about to complain.

The snippet above is one small portion of this rather lengthy, but well worth the read piece.