Mike Sylvester,

I am 100% in agreement that the Baath Party had to go and a new military model created. Plus, the new model is more robust and would do a better job of resisting Iranian incursions.

I look at this conflict the same way I looked at it before the Surge Success. All wars are unique and the enemy will do things you least expect. We did not expect the Baathists’ Fedayeen units to be pre-positioned and ready for a guerrilla war, but we came to grips with it and in stages we took the enemy apart. As the Fedayeen were wearing down the al Qaeda thugs injected themselves more assertively, and concurrently with that development the Iranian al Quds units became more active. Counterinsurgency warfare is not easy or quick. Unfortunately, for the President and his cabinet, they decided not to tell the American people about what the Russian GRU was doing in Iraq in the months and weeks before the war. It cost him dearly in the nasty, vicious internal political war inside this country. The American people were not being told the whole story about how the war was going – how we were not losing militarily, but were stuck in a strategy of not being aggressive enough because the leadership thought we should have a lower profile. Interestingly, we could not begin to be truly aggressive until we got more Iraqi units up and running. It was they who gave us the cover to be more assertive. In Iraq the most visible elements were Iraqi, with us in the shadows with the mailed fist to back them up and do our own ops as well.

Another success story the public was never told was how we gradually used technology to pretty much get control of the enemy’s use of IED’s. But that program was classified and perhaps we didn’t want the enemy to know about it. Fair enough.