Redstate

when it comes to success in Iraq, "The check is in the mail"...
Unfortunately everyone except for the dye hard true believers has tuned out the white house as completely un-credible when it comes to information about the war. It may be that teh surge was necessary, but who believes the current administration these days when it comes to the war?

that you are merely ignorant.

The surge, announced by the President in January, has three parts:

Part 1, which went into effect around March, was the aggressive and proactive movement of American and Iraqi forces into Baghdad. These were existing forces, along with some of the 5 additional combat brigades. The effect of the policing, checkpoints, outposts, etc was to bring some level of security to neighborhoods that had seen Al Qaeda violence, militias, and a milder form of ethnic cleansing in mixed Sunni-Shia neighborhoods. As a result of the influx of troops, some neighborhoods had an improved level of security, reflected by thelower casualty rate, the opening of markets, etc, and the return of people who had fled. This is not really debatable, but it does not constitute the surge.

Part 2 (which we are in now) was announced by General Petraeus on June 15 and began June 19. This is Operation Phantom Thunder, which is targeted at Al Qaeda in Iraq in the Sunni areas around Baghdad (the "belts") and in the majority Sunni provinces, Diyala, Salahaddin, etc. This involves more than 10,000 US troops and is the largest operation since the invasion. So far we have been quite successful in killing Al Qaeda and destroying or capturing their weapons.

Let's see: The operation began June 19, this is July 8, or about three weeks later, right?? That's the reference being made here.

So to ansewer your question: yes, it did just begin three weeks ago.

Part 3, by the way, is an assault on Baghdad and a complete rollup of all the insurgent forces. Look for that in a month or so.

All this information is available to anyone who truly tries to understand what is happening in Iraq. i suggest you widen your sources beyond the mainstream media and Democrat talking points to inlude some experts on the war. You could start with frederick Kagan, the author of the surge, who recently testified before Congress. Other good sources are Bill Roggio, who updates the order of battle and troop movements and operations every day, also check out the Small Arms Journal and read David Kilcullen on the theory of counterinsurgency.

Success is just a few months away.

The Iraqi government is batting 0% on getting their benchmarks done. At the end of the day, the surge and everything else is about us standing down and the Iraqi's standing up.

I have never doubted that our military, at a high enough cost, could achieve anything in Iraq. But, they can't make the Iraqi people get along in peace after we leave.

Until you can show me that, I will doubt the surge and the continuation of the mission.

The best case that anyone makes is not victory, its the absence of defeat.

of the mission in Iraq to being against it?

Envisioning when all that is Left is the Right.

let me say this first. I have enormous respect for the President and am proud to say I voted for him twice and have no regrets. At the time, I strongly supported the toppling of Saddam and admired the President for attempting risky and bold. I still feel that way.

It was absolutely worth trying to fundmentally change the dynamics of the middle east with this experiment in democracy in Iraq. The status quo was not working.

As its turned out, it's my belief that the Iraqi people have rejected the offer of a peaceful and democratic country. There is hatred and jealousy built up over centuries that has made revenge and domination more important than peace and prosperity.

I remember feeling very hopeful when al-Zarqawi was killed. I believed we had cut off the head of the dragon and had scored some major intelligence that would result in the further destruction of AQ.

The immediate result was increased violence, which we were told, was expected because operations were already planned. However, the violence only continued.

Last Sept I had breakfast with a relative who was just back from Iraq. That was the turning point for me. He basically told me things were far worse than i could imagine, the police and army they were training were going around at night kidnapping and killing. He told me he was 100% for the mission but as we talked i realized, he was 100% for the guys he was with and didn't really believe the Iraqi's could do it themselves.

Right now, I don't think the political will is there to play this out for the 9 more years Gen Petraeous says it will take to see if the Iraqi's can stand up. We will be getting out of Iraq long before then. The only question is how far down is the Republican party going to drop because of this.

pathetic last sentence. Good to see honesty, though, and to know that you value the status of the GOP over the LIVES of people like these:

I wish I could re-write it.

What I meant is this - I have no confidence in the democrats to be able to lead the country in the ongoing GWOT. For the sake of the country, I feel that it is important, critically important, that they are driving the bus. The worst Republican is better than the best dem in this fight.

Thanks for the clarification, sdh.

Attention Deficit Disorder. I suggest you do at least a cursory reading about the formation of the United States. It took years. Thousands of colonials killed each other based upon their loyalties. Great atrocities were committed by both sides. 10s of thousands of Loyalists left America as refugees. The government was mostly in shambles with competing interests. Soldiers deserted and changed sides in significant numbers. The economy was destroyed. The war was used by other nations to further their own interests.

However, from those years of chaos a great nation emerged, yet you have given up on Iraq in half the time that it took just to fight the Revolutionary War.

Also, tell me how many years it took to stabilize Japan and Germany to the point they could be trusted to operate as a Democracy?

Feckless is an easy path, isn't it? Resolve is hard road.

Envisioning when all that is Left is the Right.

In Wilkes County, Georgia, which is near where I live in Athens, there was the battle of Kettle Creek, fought entirely between militias with no British or Colonial troops involved. You can read the historical marker for yourself in the enlarged photo. Certainly it was a time that tried mens' souls, as Thomas Paine put it.

lesterblog.blogspot.com

it does not change his point. In our current difficulies, the most frustrating part is that the majority of the population suffers from IAADD. When they go to the polls how many of them will think, 'Gees, Jack Bauer saves the world in just 24 hours, and with the most powerful military on the planet, we can't win a war against a rag-tag band of desert nomads in 5 years. Time to get the h*ll out of there. And since the Republican won't I guess I'll have to vote for Hillary, because this is the most important issue in this election.'

And at that point the unfortunate families who supported our efforts to establish a modern liberal (in the classical sense of the word) state in the Middle East will be marched into the public square and be publicly beheaded.

While I despise this scenario, it is what I see coming. What I don't yet see is a hint of the way to prevent it.

You are comparing what is going on to the American Revolution?

Goodness Gracious.

I don't see any Jefferson, Franklin or Washington there...

More like Mao, Lenin and Hitler.

You obviously have none peering out your naval with only one eye.

Envisioning when all that is Left is the Right.

them.

What happened to the three weeks? What happened to the credibility of the surge? In your original post it was in tatters as you so cleverly caught supporters in a contradiction.

Not.

The short term focus comes from President Bush and supporters of the war. Anyone who says "We should give the Surge a chance before pulling the plug", has a short term focus, and is not advocating counter-insurgency war. Anyone who says "The surge might end the war in six months by killing a lot of enemy" has a short term focus and is not talking about counter-insurgency fighting.

Conventional wars are won by killing the enemy. Counter-insurgency wars CANNOT won by killing the enemy, by killing the insurgency and "rolling it up". No insurgency can be ended by killing the enemy. They are too widely disbursed, unlike a conventional war like WWII. They don't surrender when they are "beaten" like a conventional army would; they go underground. Insurgencies are killed by turning the population against them.

That's not just my opinion, it was what General Petraeus believes and what he put into the US Army/Marine counter-insurgency manual. That is what Kagan says, if he is read in depth.

Now killing enemy is a good thing in counter-insurgency as part of a bigger, long-term strategy. But the President has no long term plan, and is treating this like one last roll of the dice. He is the one (incorrectly) setting expectations, not enemies of the war.

President Bush allowed the Congress to set bench marks on the Iraqis, agreeing (incorrectly) that they were are important to the war. A real war depends on the battle field, not Iraqis passing oil laws. Politics is part of ending a war or avoiding one, not fighting one. A 15 year counter-insurgency war is not lost because the government accomplishes nothing during a few months.

Keeping tens of thousands of conventional troops in Iraq, which is straining our military to its limits, as well as taking the amount of casualties we are, is an inherently short term strategy. Bush was given the option of "Go long", and he instead chose a "surge".

It's not the public's fault that "surge" is seen as short term -- that's the definition of the word. A "long term surge"? I was shocked when the Administration agreed with calling it "surge". At first I thought that was just a smear word by the Left, but then came to realize that's what the President believed.

Sorry, but I can't blame the public for the short term focus. It was chosen by the commander in chief himself, with little input from Congress or even the Military. Militarily, the surge seems almost meaningless, and appears to have been chosen by Bush for political reasons, and because it fits his personality.

I hoped that when the President rethought everything, that we would finally start fighting a counter-insurgency war. Instead, it is a conventional "surge" led by a counter insurgency general.

(People quite rightly could say "The Surge could be a useful first step". Exactly, and that's what I said because I believed Bush would have more steps. But if one knows the Surge is just the first step in a long, long war, he won't tell everyone to just wait a few months and see how the surge is doing.)

It seems to me that both sides are fighting Vietnam again, while no one is thinking about how we should fight in Iraq and the War on Terror.

The liberals want unconditional withdrawal because that's what we did in Vietnam, and they liked the results. The Left got huge Congressional majorities back then.

Among people who don't want withdrawal, there is constant talk about avoiding another Vietnam, and not having pictures of desperate riders on helicopters. Yet there is almost no talk of alternatives, like switching to Special Forces or Dick Cheney's "80% Solution" of choosing sides among the Iraqis. It feels like this is being thought of as a chance to refight Vietnam, to beat an insurgency with conventional forces.

It is tragic that there are so few alternatives from either side. "Surge or withdraw" are the only choices we hear about.

there is almost no talk of alternatives, like switching to Special Forces

What does this mean, Wu?

Dick Cheney's "80% Solution" of choosing sides among the Iraqis.

Please elaborate on this one, as well.

It feels like this is being thought of as a chance to refight Vietnam, to beat an insurgency with conventional forces.

Well, that just shows the folly of your "feelings." While you might have been even a little bit accurate with that statement last year or the year before, making it now shows a (sadly unsurprising) total ignorance of events in Iraq.

You see, there's this little publication called Army Field Manual 3-24. The 242-page pub is called "counterinsurgency," authored by General David Petraeus (yes, the Gen. Petraeus who is now commander of multinational forces in Iraq), which lays out the tactics and surrounding strategy for combating an insurgency -- taking into account historical successes and failures, and the complexities of past and current such situations. It is being put into effect right now in Iraq.

You might want to open your eyes from time to time - you appear to be missing a whole lot at the moment.

First because we won. So when someone says refighting Nam they should start with imprisoning Teddy the hut.

Second, I don't like to make the Vietnam comparison, because the situations aren't the same. There is no North Iraq. There is an analog of russia, but its Iran and frankly they aren't comparable. An AQ takeover of the country isn't a very likely outcome but devolution into complete chaos is.

On the other hand we have an enemy that our tactics initially weren't quite right to deal with. During Vietnam we had many innovations in tactics that we heard about some we didn't till afterwards. ( helicopter insertion, secure hamlets, advanced sensors, the original smart weapons, the rediscovery of special forces, etc). To be fair in the end they worked just not fast enough to win the political battle here.

Is there any sign that Petraeous will be able to accomplish whats needed before the dems cut him off at the knees ?
______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

Fighting a counterinsurgency and leaving behind a stable republic can take a decade -- and it should, if done right. Gen. Petraeus was given 3/4 of a year from his confirmation. The politicians will not allow longer.

Measurable progress? Sure - but you have to know what to look for, and what "measurable progress" is at this point in a counterinsurgency. It won't be in the obvious places that the general, Wu Wei-level-of-uninformed population casually looks.

And it is clear that you did not, you will see that the surge did get fully implemented on June 15th. Of this year, one might add.

Do check the facts before you call one of the Contributors a liar. Some of them are not so tolerant of that sort of thing.

"At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid." --Friedrich Nietzsche

and you didn't pay attention. This is not good.

The surge began when all the troops were in place. Certainly, there were preliminary actions; General Petraeus called them "shaping operations," and we did take casualties during these operations. They used the forces as they came in, instead of having them sit around and wait for everyone else to arrive.

Please tell me you get it. And please do not call my friend a liar unless you know of what you are talking.