Soccer Dad

Surging out of control

In The Surge:First Fruits (or here) Charles Krauthammer examines the various signs of success of the new policy in Iraq despite

... the debate at home about Iraq becomes increasingly disconnected from the realities of the war on the ground. The Democrats in Congress are so consumed with negotiating among their factions the most clever linguistic device to legislatively ensure the failure of the administration's current military strategy -- while not appearing to do so -- that they speak almost not at all about the first visible results of that strategy.

(See Iraq: a place of ambivalence at Huffington Post as a point of contrast.)

What has happened?

Why? Because, as Lt. Col. David Kilcullen, the Australian counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. David Petraeus, has written, 14 of the 18 tribal leaders in Anbar have turned against al-Qaeda. As a result, thousands of Sunni recruits are turning up at police stations where none could be seen before. For the first time, former insurgent strongholds such as Ramadi have a Sunni police force fighting essentially on our side.

(See Big Lizards' Al Qaeda in Iraq: Committing Institutional Suicide for similar observations.)

Krauthammer goes on to tell how the United States and its allies are winning back Baghdad, though, it is now "... a largely Shiite city." So Krauthammer asks why are the Democrats looking for a way out of Iraq?

... where was the mandate for withdrawal? Almost no Democratic candidates campaigned on that. They campaigned for changing the course the administration was on last November.

Which the president has done. He changed the civilian leadership at the Defense Department, replaced the head of Central Command and, most critically, replaced the Iraq commander with Petraeus -- unanimously approved by the Democratic Senate -- to implement a new counterinsurgency strategy.

At the end Krauthammer praises Senator McCain for taking a bold stand for the war and asks

How many other presidential candidates ... do you think are acting in the same spirit?

UPDATE: More at Buzztracker and Memeorandum. Confederate Yankee digests the Krauthammer article and other similarly themed essays. He puts the surge into stark terms:

The "surge" of American troops into Iraq only half-begun as part of Commanding General David Petraeus' counter-insurgency doctrine will be the final major push of American forces into the Iraq theater. With the success of the surge, the stabilization of Iraq means that American forces should be able to start drawing down in victory. If the surge does not work, the American public will be able to elect a President in 2008 that will bring our troops home in defeat. Either way, the surge represents America's endgame, for better or worse.

Iraq

Blogdigger tags: Iraq, The Surge, Charles Krauthammer.