[antimedia] antimedia: A little more than a week ago....

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Posted by antimedia:
A little more than a week ago....
http://www.antimedia.us/posts/1186792382.shtml


   ....two men, writing in the New York Times, caused quite a stir with
   their op-ed, A War We Just Might Win. People on the right were amazed
   that such an article could appear in the Times. People on the left
   pooh-poohed it saying it was unrealistic.
   One of the writers, Michael OâHanlon, works at the left-leaning
   Brookings Institute and is the author of the continuously updated
   [1]Iraq Index (pdf).
   The Times article begins

     VIEWED from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with
     American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel, the political
     debate in Washington is surreal. The Bush administration has over
     four years lost essentially all credibility. Yet now the
     administrationâs critics, in part as a result, seem unaware of the
     significant changes taking place.
     Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We
     are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms.
     As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush
     administrationâs miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by
     the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily
     âvictoryâ but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis
     could live with.
     After the furnace-like heat, the first thing you notice when you
     land in Baghdad is the morale of our troops. In previous trips to
     Iraq we often found American troops angry and frustrated â many
     sensed they had the wrong strategy, were using the wrong tactics
     and were risking their lives in pursuit of an approach that could
     not work.
     Today, morale is high. The soldiers and marines told us they feel
     that they now have a superb commander in Gen. David Petraeus; they
     are confident in his strategy, they see real results, and they feel
     now they have the numbers needed to make a real difference.

   Not just opinion, the article is based upon the years of research
   O'Hanlon has done in Iraq.
   Here's the preface to the most recent Iraq Index.

     Iraq at the End of July
     After a trip of 8 days one of us (O'Hanlon) took to Iraq this July,
     revisions are needed in some key numbers in the
     Iraq Index. This is in part because fresh data have recently become
     available, and in part because the U.S. military and Bush
     administration have not done a sufficient job getting data into the
     American public debate. It required a trip to Iraq to get access to
     some information that really should be widely available on this
     side of the Atlantic.
     A more thorough accounting will follow in the coming days, but in
     short, civilian fatality levels in Iraq now seem to have declined
     substantially more than previous Pentagon reports or data had
     indicated. In particular, the monthly civilian fatality rate from
     sectarian violence appears about one-third lower than in the
     pre-surge months. That is still far too high, and remains
     comparable to violence levels of the 2004-2005 period, but it
     nonetheless reflects progress.
     Iraq's economy is struggling along. But it is not doing nearly
     enough to create more jobs. There are some reports of improving
     electricity performance, however, and we will continue to research
     those. There are also more American provincial reconstruction teams
     helping rebuild Iraq's economy, but it will take longer to see
     major results from their work.
     Metrics for assessing the progress of Iraqi security forces remain
     mediocre. In particular, while the United States does track the
     numbers of Iraqi units trained and equipped, it does not have a
     good system for determining their reliability in the face of
     sectarian pressures and strains. There are some fledgling efforts
     to gauge the dependability of individual commanders, but naturally
     these assessments must stay secret--and broader gauges of units on
     the whole do not really exist.
     Similarly, while U.S. commanders assert that they have much more
     reliable intelligence, that they are finding and destroying more
     caches of enemy weapons, and that they are now initiating more
     engagements with their opponents (rather than being ambushed), we
     do not yet have good data to track such trends. Again, we will
     continue to pursue it.
     On balance, Iraq at the end of July is showing significant signs of
     battlefield momentum in favor of U.S./coalition military forces,
     but there is nonetheless little good to report on the political
     front and only modest progress on the economic side of things.

   There are two things that should be noted about the Times article and
   the Index preface. O'Hanlon and Pollard rightly criticize the Bush
   administration for their awful failures in communication. Second,
   while noting the Bush administrations terrible loss of credibility,
   they fail to point out that that loss of credibility is a direct
   result of a continuous brutal assault over four years by those on the
   left who have placed political gain above the security of this nation.
   The left has not only criticized the administration. They have labeled
   the President a liar, called him Hitler and King George, called for
   his and the Vice President's impeachments, unceasingly attacked every
   member of the administration they could and repeatedly attempted to
   tie the administration's hands by consuming their time with endless
   "investigations" such as the ridiculous attempt to get rid of Attorney
   General Gonzales for exercising his constitutional authority by firing
   US Attorneys who reported to him.
   Tags: [2]Iraq [3]surge [4]stats

References

   1. http://www3.brookings.edu/fp/saban/iraq/index.pdf
   2. http://technorati.com/tag/Iraq
   3. http://technorati.com/tag/surge
   4. http://technorati.com/tag/stats