Here's the take of a real soldier in Iraq on the Times article I quoted in my previous post. I hope he's completely right, and there have been no new terrorist tactics employed. I'm not convinced this will be the last weekend like this, but we can hope. And difficulties were prediected for the changeover period.

Read the whole thing. The "daisy chain" technique is very basic, and they were doing that from the very beginning--we were running into some of them in May and June. We were running into the 'bait and switch' technique --where they'd put a shell out in plain view hoping you'd stop and bunch up, and then blow a series of hidden IEDs pretty regularly-- by the first week of July.

If the article tells us anything, it's that the new bunch of military officers in Baghdad that provided the source material for this story are probably recent arrivals, and are still going through a discovery mode.

The new units are going to have to go through a steep learning curve, but that shouldn't take too long. It's just going to be a very painful process for a while.