My friend Michael Totten has an article up, The Peace Corps With Muscle, that I have linked to several times in the comments here at Classical Values. So I thought it was time to do a front pager and look at how the war is going in what used to be one of the toughest neighborhoods in Iraq.

Now that major combat operations are finished almost everywhere in Iraq's Anbar Province, the United States Army and Marine Corps are more like a United Nations peacekeeping force with rules of engagement that allow them to kill if they have to. "We're like the Peace Corps with muscles," is how one soldier put it when I left with his unit at 4:00 in the morning to deliver food stuffs and toys to needy families in the countryside on the edge of the desert.

During this day that Michael reports on American forces in Ramadi were guarding an aid mission convoy.

The police trucks and Humvees rolled along at perhaps one mile an hour as women, children, and a few men emerged groggily from their homes and walked up to the convoy.

Iraqi police officers handed heavy bags of flour and rice to adults and gave out smaller packages to the children.

All I could do was take pictures and notes. It was an awkward moment. I felt dumb and also like an intruder for seeing humble people in moments of weakness at dawn in front of their houses.

Children swarmed the roads and fought their way to the sides of the trucks. The Iraqi police yelled at them as they handed out items. The Americans quietly provided security for everyone while this was happening.

Iraq is a painful country. It hurts those who live there, and it hurts those who go there. It isn't the saddest place I've ever visited - Libya earns that dubious distinction. But it is the most distressing, not only because of the violence and horror almost everyone who lives there has experienced, and in many places still experiences, but because it's hard to shake the dreadful feeling that terrible forces are gearing up to punish the place even more.

Anbar Province, while broken by war, is sort of okay.

This is what it's like now in and just outside Ramadi. This mission is the kind of thing embedded journalists see, which is why most war correspondents embed somewhere else. Soldiers Hand Out Newspapers and Rice isn't much of a headline, and it's even less of a scoop. But this is the kind of work soldiers do now every day in what was recently the most violent place in Iraq.

Shaulie: do you have hope for the mission? Your Ramadi dispatches incline me to the former, but when you mention Baghdad you seem to incline to the latter.

Not a lot. Only a little.

I think of the mission mostly as damage control at this point.

It looks to me like the US and Iraq are screwed if we stay and more even screwed if we leave.

But I don't know what is going to happen. No one does. I give it a one-in-four shot, but that's a gut-feeling guess.

Iraq isn't quite as bad a place as it was, but it is still an emergency room case as a whole. We'll just have to wait and see what happens.

If anyone can "save" Iraq, Petraeus can because he knows what he is doing. If he can't pull it off, probably nobody can. If the Iraqis don't get their act together it doesn't matter how good Petraeus is at his job.

A soldier asks:

"What are you doing here in August anyway?" he said.

"A fine question," I said as I seriously wondered why I hadn't waited for October or even November. The heat in Iraq during the summer is enough to make a religious man rail against God. I'm baffled, frankly, at how human civilization began in a place so inhospitable to human beings. Someone, I forget who, compared facing the afternoon breeze to sticking a hair dryer in your face while pouring sand on your head. That pretty much says it. It is much worse than in a place like Arizona, for instance, because you can hardly catch a break from it unless you stay on base in one of the buildings.

If you like what you saw and read here from Michael go to his www site and put a few pennies in the tip jar. He does what he does on the dimes we send him.

Thanks Michael and God Bless you, our military, and the people of Iraq.