So Abu Risha, our new ally in al Anbar, was helping us turn the tide on al Qaeda. But now al Qaeda has killed him in an explosion near his home in Ramadi. So they're fighting back. And it's a major setback in the progress we've made in the province.

That at least is the narrative you'll read in most of the US press.

But is any of it true? As Spencer Ackerman reports here, a lot of people who know a lot about the region and the people involved say that AQI ("al Qaida in Iraq") remains a miniscule part of the Sunni insurgency. Perhaps a disproportionately lethal part of it, but so small as to make any equation of the Sunni insurgency and 'al Qaeda' deeply misleading. Indeed, many experts express doubt that al Qaeda is even responsible for Abu Risha's death. At least as likely, says Marc Lynch, it was "one of the nationalist insurgency groups, the ones which current American rhetoric pretends don't exist."

I did an interview yesterday with Juan Cole -- which we're going to try to bring you soon on TPMtv -- and his take was broadly similar to Lynch's. There really is something changing in al Anbar. Attacks are down substantially. But the 'turning against al Qaeda' storyline is at best deeply misleading. More accurate would be to say that we're getting a bit more savvy about using patronage/bribery to recruit a tribal clientage willing to act as our proxies in the region. And in itself that's probably a very shrewd move. Cole makes the point that a lot of these tribes tried to do business with us years ago, only to get sent packing after a quick pat-down and weapons search. And it is worth keeping in mind that some of what we're calling 'tribes' here are more aptly termed gangs.

For me, the fog of war is compounded by my relative ignorance of the players involved and the thousands of miles between me and Iraq. But I know enough to be deeply skeptical when the news of the day conforms so tightly to the expectations of policies and storylines we know to be based on misdirection, lies and questionable ideology.

So maybe this small extremist group, AQI, really did kill Abu Risha.. But there's enough evidence out there to suggest that everything we're hearing really is through the looking glass, a highly distorted version of events designed to keep us locked in our ratcheting vise of policy catastrophe.