. . . will the media cover it? After reading the following exchange, I must conclude the answer is only if the U.S. knocked it down, put a rag over the tree’s head and called it Betty. From a press conference with Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, commander, Multinational Corps Iraq:

Q General, this is Bob Burns from AP. I’d like to ask you a question about Swarmer. Is there a reconstruction, economic development piece that goes hand in hand with this operation or is it strictly an offensive operation? And also, has it, at this early stage, revealed anything to you about the Zarqawi operation in that area?

GEN. CHIARELLI: There’s a — we work all lines of operation in every single operation we conduct, and I think Swarmer will be no different from any other one. We consider that an essential part of what we’re doing. And I think you can tell by Swarmer it was conducted in the desert, for all practical purposes, in an area about 10 miles by 10 miles. It was a large operation consisting of Iraqis and U.S. forces. Again, it’s one of those changes that has taken place since I came back to Iraq. Had we tried to accomplish a mission like this 11 months ago, it would have been primarily U.S. forces. But in this case — I think you’ve all seen the numbers — is we have primarily Iraqi forces supported by U.S. and coalition forces. And I can tell you that we will work all lines of operation, including reconstruction, in support of the Iraqi people in that area at the completion of the operation.

So Operation Swarmer was a practice excercise led by Iraqi forces. The area was chosen because direct intelligence indicated there were safe houses, car bomb factories and terrorists within the region. According to General Chiarelli, there are very few inhabitants of this desert region.

Naturally, that leads us to a second question.

Q General, this is Joe Tabet with Al Hurra Channel. Would you please give us more details about the Swarmer operation? What kind of resistance are you facing in Samarra?

GEN. CHIARELLI: Let me handle the first part of your question. First of all, Swarmer was an operation out in the desert. It really marks a change, and it marks an evolution — our ability to get outside many of the large metropolitan areas and begin to do and conduct operations based on intelligence we receive both from U.S. sources, from Iraqi sources in areas where we think insurgent networks are operating. And that’s really why the size of the operation was the way it was, is that it was a huge area — 10 kilometers by 10 kilometers (sic) [10 miles by 10 mile]. We had intelligence that — we had anti-coalition terrorists and foreign fighters working in that area, and it took a lot of Iraqi soldiers and U.S. support to get into the area that we wanted to work. We’ll be in there for a couple of days searching for caches.

The amount of resistance we had was very, very light. I think the last count I had is that we have 31 individuals that we have detained, but we found caches of just about everything that you find, everything from 120-millimeter rockets to 107-millimeter rockets, 130- millimeter projectiles, mortars, some SA-7 components, and munitions. So we found what you would expect to find and what we expected to find out there. We’ll continue to look for caches and any other terrorists and foreign fighters that might be in the area.

Oh, so the place described properly in most press accounts as being northeast of Samarra and not actually Samarra is accurate? That place is commonly referred to as a . . . desert. Operation Swarmer was a nice step, or an evolution as described by General Chiarelli, because the Iraqi military was able to step outside the normal framework of cities and operate out in the . . . desert.

By now the press corps should have figure out what Operation Swarmer was all about, or so we would think. Apparently not.

Q This is the other Lisa, Lisa Meyer, from AP Radio. I’ve got two questions about Operation Swarmer. I’m wondering if you could describe what the composition of the leave-behind force will be once the operation is completed, whether it will be Iraqi or American, both; whether it will be police commandos, whatever. And also about the timing of it. Could you explain to us — there are some people that say that there’s a political subtext here, and I’m wondering if you could describe whether in fact there was a long period of time that transpired between conception and execution.

GEN. CHIARELLI: I really can’t — I can’t figure out why people did the analysis that they did. I think that anybody’s who’s been on the ground — and there are a lot of folks that have been on the ground — I think today we had some people up there — will see that this is a largely uninhabited area that is 10 miles by 10 miles; it is a huge area where we had some direct intelligence but where we felt what we needed to do was really look through that entire area, look for these caches. There’s a science to hiding this stuff, and we went out there with that in mind.

As for stay-behind forces, again I don’t want to comment on follow-on operations. I can tell you we’ll be working in there for a number of days, and we’ll continue to work in there again at a later date if intelligence indicates that we need to go back in there. But we will be working with the people, the small population that is in there, to work some of the non-kinetic lines that I mentioned earlier.

By now surely every reporter knows that Operation Swarmer was in a very remote desert where very few people actually live. Once again, we assume incorrectly.

Q General, Al Pessin from Voice of America. I wanted to follow up on the second Lisa question. When we heard about the series of operations in northern Iraq last year, the idea was that you were leaving Iraqi forces behind to secure the areas. Are you not doing that this time? I understand it’s at least the second time that this particular area’s been assaulted. So are you planning to then leave it and perhaps end up having to do this again?

GEN. CHIARELLI: I’m not going to comment on what forces we’re going to leave or any kind of operational matters of what we’re going to do in the future. The issue is that we had good intelligence so we needed to go out in this area. We needed to look at this area. We needed to conduct operations in this area. Some focused on very specific targets. Others focused on targets that we saw throughout that 10-mile by 10-mile area, and we conducted those operations. There’s — I can tell you there’s not an intent to stay out in all 10- miles by 10-miles, but I’m not going to comment on exactly where we’re going to be at the conclusion of this operation — just that we’re not going to leave until we’ve done everything we need to do out in that particular area of operations.

My follow up question is what kind of compensation is the United States military prepared to leave behind in order to rebuild trees and the car bomb factories found and destroyed by this heinous offensive?

In what has to be the strangest connection to Operation Swarmer, Neal Woolrich of ABC radio in Australia says “The US military’s Operation Swarmer in Iraq gave oil traders a scare overnight, pushing the price of West Texas Crude up $US 1.35 a barrel.” Hmmm. Operation Swarmer in a desert region in Iraq increased the cost of West Texas oil? Surely the increase in West Texas oil has nothing to do with the grassfires in the Panhandle of Texas. Because, you know, that would be the more reasonable assumption based on the fact the grassfires are, or were before this weekend’s torrential rain, in and around oil fields and oil and natural gas refineries.

Also in the same press conference, General Chiarelli discussed the media’s coverage of Iraq after the bombing of the Al Askariya Shrine.

In the days immediately following the Samarra bombing, the press was actively tracking and reporting every single mosque attack, but the vast majority of the reporting was off the mark. I recalled reports of hundreds of mosques attacked and 30 mosques burning in Baghdad in one night. These reports were terribly inaccurate.

As we received reports of mosque attacks, we sent forces out to physically check the mosques for damage. We received 81 reports of mosques being attacked from sources other than our subordinate units. Of these 81 mosque reports, 17 had light damage, such as bullet holes or broken glass, and six had medium damage, repairable within six months. Only two mosques were completely destroyed, and none were burned.

Keep in mind, these reports are for a country that has thousands of mosques. Yet as I watched the news, I thought that every mosque in Iraq was being attacked.

General Chiarelli also says it is the goal to have Iraqi forces secure 70 percent of Iraq by the end of Summer, up from their less than 50 percent now. Doing so will put Iraqis more in charge of security in their nation, but it will also free up the Iraqi military for more operations similar to Swarmer. To help this out, the U.S. military is now training Iraqi police units in order to help free up the Iraqi military.

UPDATE: Code Pink Co-Founder Medea Benjamin appeared on The O’Reilly Factor to discuss, among other things, Operation Swarmer (video here).

Well, first off all Sunnis and Shias have lived together peacefully for thousands of years. The U.S. is exasperating the ethnic tensions. Look now at Samarra where the U.S. is bombing villages creating more orphans, war widows, more grief, more anger against us, more insurgents and more ethnic tensions.

This is the face of the anti-war Left. I had no clue that Sunnis and Shia had lived together peacfully for thousands of years, and what part of desert does Miss Benjamin not understand?