From Robert Burns, a pretty upbeat piece on the military situation in Iraq and the effect of the surge:
BAGHDAD – The new U.S. military strategy in Iraq, unveiled six months ago to little acclaim, is working. In two weeks of observing the U.S. military on the ground and interviewing commanders, strategists and intelligence officers, it’s apparent that the war has entered a new phase in its fifth year. It is a phase with fresh promise yet the same old worry: Iraq may be too fractured to make whole. No matter how well or how long the U.S. military carries out its counterinsurgency mission, it cannot guarantee victory. Only the Iraqis can. And to do so they probably need many more months of heavy U.S. military involvement. Even then, it is far from certain that they are capable of putting this shattered country together again.
Burns worries about the political piece of the puzzle, as O’Hanlon and Pollack and just about every other sensible observer has, but the sense that the surge is, at the very least, showing significant progress in the military sphere is also having an effect on the debate here at home. Bush’s approval rating is up 5 points–it’s a start–and support for the initial invasion has ticked up as well, from 35 percent to 42 percent. As the boss asks in this week’s editorial, one wonders if the tide isn’t starting to turn against the antiwar crowd.
