We know now that we can pull off a successful counterinsurgency in Iraq. We know that we are working with an increasingly willing citizenry. But counterinsurgency, like community policing, requires lots of boots on the ground. You can't do it from inside a jet or a tank.
Read the whole thing. And buy his book! Get a second copy to send your congressman.
"Now he says we can't afford to withdraw because violence is down."
Ted Kennedy to General Petraeus.
Me to Ted Kennedy: A year ago, you wanted to give up because we were losing, and now, you want to give up because we're winning.
Read it all... and then stop being so self-righteous.The only thing I can offer, at this point, is the hope that we can figure out how not to do it again. This being what I've tried to do by outlining how I went wrong.
This is, as I have tried to say in other posts, valuable information--information that opponents of the war are losing as they insist that the thing was obvious. Given that the defense and diplomacy staff of several administrations, a large number of IR scholars, and enormous swathes of the think tank world got it wrong, the one thing it clearly wasn't is obvious.
The State of Iraq: An Update"IRAQ’S security turnaround has continued through the winter. The question for 2008 is whether Iraqi security forces can preserve and build on this improvement as they increasingly bear more of the responsibility as the number of American troops declines (and as refugees and internally displaced Iraqis try to return to their homes)."Certainly it's bad news for Obama.....
Spencer Ackerman offered a gentle critique of his friend George Packer's essay on Iraq in the premiere issue of the new World Affairs journal. I'd go a bit further -- I think this very much represents the worst of Packer's writing on Iraq rather than the best. It opens with some striking on-the-ground reporting from Iraq, then shifts to a discussion of how un-visceral these events are to most Americans, who are far more distanced from the conflict than we were from Vietnam and earlier wars. Eventually, though, it shifts into a kind of lame plea for open-mindednessWell, Mr. Packer, one of the war's earliest critics, seems to have softened his stance since his last visit. Even Michael Totten credits him with a fair-minded approach to the latest goings-on in Iraq:
Liberal journalist George Packer has spent a lot of time in Iraq and is a reliable critic of the Bush Administration and the war. He, like me, has his opinions and doesn't conceal them. But he reports what he sees honestly and comprehensively. You can trust him whether you agree with his views or not.I think poor George is about to get shived by his old liberal friends. Any call for reason or patience regarding the war, or, more importantly the long-term outcome will not be tolerated. You can be sure of it....
“I can never blame the Americans alone,” an Iraqi refugee named Firas told me in early 2007. “It’s the Iraqis who destroyed their country, with the help of the Americans, under the American eye.” To gain this wisdom, Firas had to lose almost everything. What would it take for Americans to understand what Firas already does? A recognition that Iraq was everyone’s loss, whichever side you were on.Read the entire story...it is memorable.
Post-Saddam Iraq is not a police state. Even so, while it's orders of magnitude more moderate and humane than the genocidal and fascistic regime it replaced, many individuals in the government and police departments have rough authoritarian habits that are rooted in Arab culture itself as much as they are legacies from the previous era.
An important article by Sudarsan Raghavan in the Washington Post shows how the AQI is coming to grips with their ever-shrinking habitat. Al Qaeda is on the run. They are demoralized and being fractured and re-fractured.
Academics at West Point have analyzed captured documents which provide an in-depth glimpse into the origins and personnel management of 'foreign fighters' bound for Iraq.
Among the more interesting findings are that ninety percent of all suicide bombers were 'foreign fighters'. The great majority had entered Iraq via Syria, "a greater proportion than previously believed", altering their point of entry as Anbar became more difficult to cross. The captured records also went a long way toward de-mythologizing the Jihadi phenomenon. One analyst said, "I think we made a mistake in assuming that al-Qaeda, because it's a terrorist organization, doesn't need to organize itself the way other large organizations do. They have a human resources problem; they have to manage people." Many of those human resource management tools would be familiar to anyone. Al-Qaeda had employment contracts, it provided 3 weeks of vacation each year and additional pay for married members.The records are "one of the deepest reservoirs of information we've ever obtained of the network going into Iraq," according to a U.S. official closely familiar with intelligence on the insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq. ... Al-Qaeda has a track record of good documentation, he said, adding that "Osama bin Laden was a businessman before he was a terrorist."
