I'm glad that armor piercing attacks against US forces in Iraq have declined but attributing this to the success of the Basra offensive which was supposed to have somehow -- and nobody in the article explains any causal mechanism -- to have crippled Iranian capabilities is a bit bizarre. It's not clear how much of these attacks ever had anything to do with Iran, but insofar as Iran is playing a role the obvious cause of a decline in the tempo of attacks is efforts at "appeasement" like the Bush administration's somewhat renewed interest in diplomacy with Teheran and so forth.