There is an excellent read from Dr. Victor Davis Hanson fresh from a trip to Iraq over at Free Republic that I recommend everyone check out and read.  He provides a great update of the status of Iraq today and provides insights that are largely missed by the mainstream media that soldiers who have patrolled in Iraq before like myself know to be true:

A common theme heard from analysts and intelligence officers is the abject irreligious nature of al Qaeda. It is not quite zealotry to cut off the fingers of smokers, take 14-year old "brides", mutilate the dead, force bodies to remain unburied, and steal businesses, homes and cars. Those are verifiable incidents-in addition to the other often told rumors of the terrorists serving children up to their parents or the employment of former male prostitutes as Al Qaeda heads. We think of bin Ladenism as a perverted distortion of Islam, but on the street level it is more a cover for gasoline and food racketeering, petty theft, and murder by young criminally-minded youth.

Soldiers spoke of confiscated computers of al Qaeda with the worst sort of pornography on them, or stories by Iraqis of known deviants, thugs, and criminals now masquerading as religious jihadists.

Here we prove incompetent in not publicizing the nature of hard-core jihadists, not just their hypocrisy and brutality, but their criminality. No doubt many of the 100,000 felons Saddam released on the eve of the war ended up working for al Qaeda, a fact we blithely forget.

This is something that cannot be understated about how many of the so called "jihadists" use Islam as a cover for their criminal activities.  Dr. Hanson is wrong that the US military has been deficient in not publicizing the nature of Al Qaeda.  If you read the press releases from Multi-national Forces Iraq they highlight the atrocities and nature of Al Qaeda all the time.  The media largely chooses not to publish it.  Independent imbedded journalists such as Michael Yon have done great work documenting the nature of Al Qaeda while the large media outlets choose not to publish it. 

I have always said that if all you know about Iraq is from the mainstream media than you know nothing about Iraq.  Reading Dr. Hanson’s article is start to learning what is really going on.