Redstate

By Pejman Yousefzadeh Posted in Featured Stories | War — Comments (2) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Clearly not.

Read on . . .

Anbar Province, long the lawless heartland of the tenacious Sunni Arab resistance, is undergoing a surprising transformation. Violence is ebbing in many areas, shops and schools are reopening, police forces are growing and the insurgency appears to be in retreat.

"Many people are challenging the insurgents," said the governor of Anbar, Maamoon S. Rahid, though he quickly added, "We know we haven't eliminated the threat 100 percent."

Many Sunni tribal leaders, once openly hostile to the American presence, have formed a united front with American and Iraqi government forces against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. With the tribal leaders' encouragement, thousands of local residents have joined the police force. About 10,000 police officers are now in Anbar, up from several thousand a year ago. During the same period, the police force here in Ramadi, the provincial capital, has grown from fewer than 200 to about 4,500, American military officials say.

At the same time, American and Iraqi forces have been conducting sweeps of insurgent strongholds, particularly in and around Ramadi, leaving behind a network of police stations and military garrisons, a strategy that is also being used in Baghdad, Iraq's capital, as part of its new security plan.

The article immediately qualifies all of this optimism, stating that the situation in Anbar province remains "uneasy and fragile." Quite so, and I imagine that at best, that is how the situation remains in the nation as a whole. Sapping the insurgency of its strength and power is going to be exceedingly complicated work and it will involve setbacks as well as progress.

But the progress in Anbar province is very real and very palpable and if the plans undertaken there end up working, they can be transferred to other parts of the country as well, much as General Petraeus's counterinsurgency plan, so successful in Mosul, is being implemented in Baghdad. While we can conclude quite readily that the reconstruction effort remaining in Iraq will be very difficult, there is no reason to conclude that it will be impossible to achieve.

Unless, of course, we convince ourselves of that impossibility. Consider the following passage:

American commanders see the progress in Anbar as a bellwether for the rest of country. "One of the things I worry about in Baghdad is we won't have the time to do the same kind of thing," Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, commander of day-to-day war operations in Iraq, said in an interview here.

That worries me too, especially given the fact that the majority in Congress appears willing and eager to help the clock run out on the reconstruction effort. Maybe the majority should take the advice they were so willing to dish out in the past and . . . you know . . . listen to the generals.

They could do worse. And thus far, they have.