At THE DAILY STANDARD we’ve posted the English translation of an interview with General Petraeus by Urs Gehriger and Matthias Rub that first appeared in the Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche. Some highlights:
Gen. Petraeus: “[W]e have seen progress in about every different respect and in almost every area of Iraq…” “[T]he trajectory is never consistently up. It’s sort of up in bumps and downs and sometimes it’s a pretty big down and then we’ll recover. What you’re hoping to do is keep it generally on a positive trajectory. And I think that’s generally true. I think if you look at, for example, attack trends. It really has been pretty steadily downward ever since June.”… “[W]e are actually almost on a two-and-one-half year low in terms of violence.” “What we have seen now for a sustained period of five or six months, since about mid-June, has been a steady reduction in violence. There was a little up-tick during Ramadan. There have been a couple of up-ticks in the past, say, ten weeks, but we’ve generally had a period of about ten weeks of levels of violence that have not been seen on a sustained basis like that since the late spring of 2005.”… “The Iraqi surge has been much greater than our surge. And actually, it is being felt.” “Yes, there’s an uneven quality to Iraqi forces but they brought in some over 160,000 this year in terms of police, soldiers, border police and other assorted Iraqi security force members. That’s huge. … There are certainly concerns about sectarian allegiances of some of them still, although a number of them have been cleaned up over the course of the past six months as well. There are, for example, national police units that are really quite good in our estimation. … So there is movement in these areas.”…
Go read the whole thing, and don’t miss the boss’s editorial: “Gen. David Petraeus, Man of the Year.”
