VIEWED from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel, the political debate in Washington is surreal. The Bush administration has over four years lost essentially all credibility. Yet now the administration’s critics, in part as a result, seem unaware of the significant changes taking place.
Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.
Monday, July 30, 2007
Two Pinkos Endorse the Surge
In the New York Times, no less.
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Sustained increases in U.S. troop levels would not solve the fundamental cause of violence in
Iraq, which is the absence of national reconciliation. A senior American general told us that
adding U.S. troops might temporarily help limit violence in a highly localized area. However,
past experience indicates that the violence would simply rekindle as soon as U.S. forces are
moved to another area. As another American general told us, if the Iraqi government does not
make political progress, “all the troops in the world will not provide security.” Meanwhile,
America’s military capacity is stretched thin: we do not have the troops or equipment to make a
substantial, sustained increase in our troop presence. Increased deployments to Iraq would also
necessarily hamper our ability to provide adequate resources for our efforts in Afghanistan or
respond to crises around the world.
- The Iraq Study Group Report, page 38 - 39
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