http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2082723/posts
Bush’s Lonely Decision
WSJ ^ | September 15, 2008
Posted on Monday, September 15, 2008 8:21:32 AM by nuconvert
Bush’s Lonely Decision
September 15, 2008
Now that even Barack Obama has acknowledged that President Bush’s surge in Iraq has “succeeded beyond our wildest dreams,” maybe it’s time the Democratic nominee gives some thought to how that success actually came about — not just in Ramadi and Baghdad, but in the bureaucratic Beltway infighting out of which the decision to surge emerged.
excerpt
Consider what confronted Mr. Bush in 2006. Following a February attack on a Shiite shrine in the city of Samarra, Iraq’s sectarian violence began a steep upward spiral.
excerpt
The “Sunni Awakening” of tribal sheiks against al Qaeda was nowhere in sight. An attempt at a minisurge of U.S. and Iraqi forces in Baghdad failed dismally. George Casey, the American commander in Iraq, believed the only way the U.S. could “win” was to “draw down” — a view shared up the chain of command, including Centcom Commander John Abizaid and then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
Politically, the war had become deeply unpopular in an election year that would wipe out Republican majorities in Congress. The bipartisan Iraq Study Group, run by James Baker and Lee Hamilton, was gearing up to offer the President the option of a politically graceful defeat, dressed up as a regional “diplomatic offensive.”
excerpt
Handed this menu of defeat, Mr. Bush played opposite to stereotype by firing Mr. Rumsfeld and seeking advice from a wider cast of advisers, particularly retired Army General Jack Keane and scholar Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute. The President also pressed the fundamental question of how the war could actually be won, a consideration that seemed to elude most senior members of his government.
Very Lincolnesque.
But instead of U.S. Grant there is David Petraeus.
Long overdue, yet not popular with many FReepers...some of whom still try to defend the way the war was mismanaged.
And if he had to get advice from neocons only, he made a good choice in Fred Kagan, a very good scholar who has real-world grounding, IMO.