Well, I was going to blog about the resignation of Adm. Fallon but as Raj Purohit and Eugene Gholz have already done so I think three would be a crowd so I will refrain.

Besides I think Fallon’s resignation has a lot less to do with Iran and more, as Fred Kaplan in Slate notes, to do with Iraq.

So let’s turn to Iraq and dwell on those items that may have flown below your radar.

First, and sadly, because I really, really, like the PBS show The Newshour with Jim Lehrer there was a journalistic lapse in the March 11 show when he discussed the “surge.” One of his guests was Frederick Kagan, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and more importantly, the author of the surge strategy, currently being implemented in Iraq.

Jim Lehrer never mentioned this which is inexcusable when you ask questions like this:

Mr. Kagan, to you first. You agree with the president that the surge has been successful, correct?

FREDERICK KAGAN, American Enterprise Institute: Absolutely.

What was more interesting was this comment from the other guest, Nir Rosen, a fellow at the New York University Center on Law and Security, and someone who spent more than two years in Iraq reporting on the Coalition occupationand, and Iraqi sectarian violence.

But what’s really frightening is that, indeed, when that sectarian fighting will resume — and it will — there’s going to be nowhere to run to, because Syria and Jordan have closed their borders to Iraqi refugees; 11 of Iraq’s 18 governors have closed their borders to internally displaced Iraqis. So when the fighting resumes intensively, it’s going to be a slaughter.

Then, this past Wednesday the House Foreign Affairs Committee held a hearing on U.S. Iraqi refugee responsibilities. According to the Center for American Progress:

Millions of Iraqi Refugees Are Relocating Around the Middle East

More than 4 million: Estimated number of Iraqis displaced since the 2003 invasion
2.2 million: Number of Iraqis displaced within Iraq
1.2 million: Number of refugees in Syria
750,000: Number of refugees in Jordan
100,000: Number of refugees in Egypt
400,000: Number of refugees in other Persian Gulf countries

 The United States Has Allowed Few Iraqi Refugees In

5,742: Total number of Iraqis resettled to the United States as of January 24
25,000: The United States’ original refugee target in 2007, which later dropped to 7,000
1,608: The actual number of Iraqi refugees admitted to the United States in 2007
202: The number of refugees admitted to the United States in 2006
198: The number of Iraqi refugees admitted to the United States in 2005
12,000: Target for Iraqi refugee admittance in 2008 fiscal year. A goal that will be impossible to meet at the current admittance levels

And the New York Times reported yesterday that newly declassified statistics on the frequency of insurgent attacks in Iraq suggest that after major security gains last fall in the wake of an American troop increase, the conflict has drifted into a stalemate, with levels of violence remaining stubbornly constant from November 2007 through early 2008. One wonders what Fred Kagan thinks of that.

And then there was this. McClatchy newspapers reported Monday that an exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein’s regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden’s al Qaida terrorist network.

Ironically the Pentagon-sponsored study, which was to be posted on the Joint Forces Command website yesterday, did confirm that Saddam’s regime provided some support to other terrorist groups. However, his security services were directed primarily against Iraqi exiles, Shiite Muslims, Kurds and others he considered enemies of his regime.

But the Bush Administration, reprising its Father Knows Best routine, decided that the American public had better things to do than learn the results of a study their tax dollars had paid for. Thus yesterday the Pentagon cancelled plans to send out a press release announcing the report’s release and will no longer make the report available online.

Finally, a new survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, found that public awareness of developments in the Iraq war has dropped precipitously since last summer, as the news media have paid less attention to the conflict.

Twenty-eight percent of the public is aware that nearly 4,000 U.S. personnel have died in Iraq over the past five years, while nearly half thinks the death tally is 3,000 or fewer and 23 percent think it is higher, according to an opinion survey released yesterday. In earlier surveys, about half of those asked about the death tally responded correctly.