In Iraq, a "Surge" Of Success

Are we succeeding in Iraq? Look no further than the front page of your daily newspaper. What had been a steady barrage of bad news has now slowed to a trickle.

Our military’s success on the ground is changing public expectations as well. A recent survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that most Americans (53 percent) now think “the U.S. will ultimately succeed in achieving its goals” in Iraq. That’s up from 42 percent in the fall of 2007.

A little more than a year ago President Bush announced he would be sending more U.S. troops to Iraq. They deployed over the course of several months, and were all in country by June. It was a bold decision. His party suffered a humiliating defeat in the mid-term elections, and the Iraq Study Group had recommended a troop withdrawal. Plus, opinion polls showed the public had soured on the war.

Still, more American troops flowed into Iraq under a new commander, Gen. David Petraeus, with a new counterinsurgency strategy that puts a premium on protecting Iraqi civilians and dispersing U.S. troops more widely to create areas of security. The results have been breathtaking.

In December 2006, there had been more than 1,600 sectarian killings in Iraq. Within six months that number had been more than cut in half. Before the surge, Anbar province was under al Qaeda’s control. “We haven’t been defeated militarily but we have been defeated politically -- and that’s where wars are won and lost,” one Army officer said in the fall of 2006.

That, too, turned around in just a few months. “I think, in that area, we have turned the corner,” Marine Gen. James Conway told reporters after visiting Anbar in April 2007, barely three months into the surge.

Things turned around fast because the surge convinced many of Iraq’s Sunnis to stop fighting the Iraqi government and join us in fighting al Qaeda.

Now, al Qaeda in Iraq has been decimated as a fighting force. Iraq’s interior ministry announced late last year that three quarters of its terrorist network had been destroyed. But all this progress is, as yet, fragile.

“I did run into anxiety among many Iraqi officials about talk of a precipitous American withdrawal from Iraq,” Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., reported after a recent trip to Iraq. “Regular Iraqis on the street see the vital and critical importance of a durable American presence, at least in the near term. And people understand the American soldier, combined with the cooperation of Sunni and Shia Arabs in this country, is the pathway toward stability and a successful free and democratic Iraq.”

This support is critical, because the United States cannot simply wash its hands of the Middle East, no matter how much we might want to. As we learned on Sept. 11, the oceans no longer protect us against the pathologies of a handful of religious extremists.

The U.S. needs to engage Muslims and encourage them to settle peacefully the differences within their faith. We’re seeing that today in Iraq, where Sunni Muslims increasingly are working with Shia Muslims to put an end to violence. This is the best way forward.

It was five years ago this month that the United States led a coalition into Iraq to, finally, remove Saddam Hussein and defend the international law he’d flouted for decades. In the years since, we’ve enjoyed successes and suffered setbacks. Predictably, opinion polls have moved up and down over the course of the war.

“He conquers who endures,” the Roman poet Persius once wrote. That’s true in Iraq as well.

If we press on in helping to pacify that nation and bringing Muslims together to battle al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, we can make the world a safer, more secure place. A worthwhile goal, to say the least -- even if the news doesn’t make the front page.

Posted by DGHoodini to weldgophardline; Starman417
On News/Activism 03/15/2008 2:59:59 PM PDT · 4 of 9

(snip)

Second, it claims that there is no evidence of “operational links with Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida terrorist network,” but in fact the report itself is packed with evidence of operational ties between Saddam’s regime and various groups that are components/participants/elements/members of the network. For example the report confirms that Egyptian Islamic Jihad was supported by Saddam’s regime at a time when 2/3 of the al-Qaida network’s leadership (2/3 of the leadership prior to 2003 was comprised of members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad. The report is also packed with examples of Saddam’s regime recognizing, supporting, and working with Egyptian Islamic Jihad; i.e. with 2/3 of al-Qaida

(snip)

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1986178/posts

Hat tip to our ‘Starman417’

Importantly, if McCain wins the election, he will have to spend a lot of time reordering the perception of Iraq from a “war”, though it is an occupation, into a “partnership for peace”, a Status of Forces agreement with Iraq much like what we had with Germany after World War II.

One of our greatest achievements with Iraq is the establishment of the Africa Command (AFRICOM), as a peer to CENTCOM. By maintaining a few major rural bases in Iraq, we will have the equivalent of three aircraft carrier groups on permanent deployment in the center of the Middle East.

A US Command has a huge area of responsibility in the world, covering many countries and their associated waterways and oceans. AFRICOM would include the ME, eastern Africa, and perhaps parts of central Asia, Pakistan and India under its watch.

The value of this is enormous. This region has long been projected to be the most troublesome in the world, with the greatest potential for war, up to and including medium sized nuclear war. It is also central to the world’s energy supply, a vast amount of shipping, and terrible political instability yet much possibility for the orderly development of democracy.

Iraq itself may develop faster than Japan did after World War II, becoming a major economic powerhouse, and potentially a founding member of a Middle East Common Market modeled after the European Common Market, the predecessor to the European Union. This would radically improve the living conditions of a billion people in the region, and strongly dampen violent extremism and tyranny.

It is likely that George W. Bush foresaw much of this prior to the occupation of Iraq, and its potentially good ramifications could last 50 or 100 years.

If John McCain takes advantage of the opportunity.

Obama or Clinton have no grasp of foreign policy, only naive petty politics, so there is a good chance they would either throw away such grand and beneficial possibilities, or just ignore and squander them, despising them as tedious adventure.

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