Vital news from Iraq:
Petraeus, the former commander in Iraq who is credited by U.S. officials with saving the country from sectarian war, emphasized that progress in Iraq remains fragile and reversible despite an 80 percent drop in violence. “But I have to say that the fragility is less,” he said in a speech to the Association of the U.S. Army, a nonprofit group that supports the armed service. “And with each passing day there is a little bit less of that fragility as progress takes on a slightly more enduring nature,” he said. It was an unusually upbeat assessment of the situation from the normally cautious Petraeus, who turned over command in Iraq to Gen. Ray Odierno last month.
Hat tip: Air Force Pundit.
However, the story does go on to say, “Petraeus was the main architect of a 2007 build-up in U.S. forces known as the surge.” The Surge was not about just throwing more troops at the problem, although you’d never know it from the idiotic name bestowed upon it by our ignorant mainstream media. “The Surge” was about implementing a new counter-insurgency strategy, of which adding a few extra combat brigades was a fairly minor part. And as Austin Bay reminded me over dinner a few weeks ago (how’s that for a name-drop?), the ability to deploy extra forces to Iraq was always in the Pentagon’s purview. But without a proper strategy, extra troops would have meant little but extra casualties and extra strain.
And that Bush wasted three years before going with a real plan is still inexcusable and inexplicable.
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