Al_Batross, I’m glad you elaborated and I would agree with the general tenor of your remarks. I do believe we had a moral obligation to secure the safety of the population once we’d entered upon this project. To my mind, that meant seeing it through to a successful completion. I can’t understand those who thought it better to leave, and leave the Iraqis to the tender mercies of the killers, than to stay and defeat our common enemy.

If we could have killed more of the enemy sooner I wouldn’t have objected. But somehow we got ourselves into a war where apparently the good guys weren’t supposed to do any killing. Which of course led to more deaths than required. I think part of the reason the Surge worked is that Petraeus incorporated a news blackout that allowed the things that needed to be done to be done. That, and embedding our guys among the population. After which it became a whole lot easier to gain the general population’s trust and cooperation, and thereby gain the human intelligence we needed to complete the mission.