Give it a rest. Petraeus is doing a great job, as the article said. There was a very steep learnign curve climbing over a lot of careerists, neocons, political hangers on, the Provisional Authority under Bremer, the mistake of bungled deBa'athification and disbandment of the Iraq army, failure to take the humanitarian side of the role seriously, no plan going in for what to do after the easy part of evicting Sadam was over. The fact that as it turns out Sadam was encircled by US forces and well contained and so it is not exactly clear that there was a pressing urgency to take him out at all.
Nothing new here. We have had to do this war after war after war. It is the same lesson over and over again.
There is really great news coming out now. No question about it.
Yes, there were plenty of mistakes made, particularly in the beginning, but there was always progress. The trouble is that only the mistakes, problems and numerous setbacks were reported, distorted, exaggerated and spun.
The progress that has been in forward motion all along and finally got us to where we are now was never reported. I've been reporting progress here on FR since 2004 and have been saying since late 2005 that eventually the progress would become so vast that the media would be unable to spin it anymore.
That time is here. The media pretty much ignores Iraq now, but it isn't hard to read between the lines of that.
No democracy has been born without sacrifice, heartache and growing pains. This one is no exception.
I said to the naysayers on here for years, "This is going to work." I was flamed, called an interesting assortment of insulting names and derided as being over-optimistic.
It's working.
Go spew your line of crap somewhere else.