Lorie Byrd: How to know if the Iraq surge is working

There won’t be an official report on the effectiveness of the U.S. military surge in Iraq until September, but sometimes-conflicting reports are already coming daily on operations occurring in and around Baghdad. How will we know whether or not the surge is working?

One obvious answer is that we won’t know whether the surge is working until operations have actually been conducted. That is not so obvious to all, though. On June 13, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told President Bush that his surge policy was a failure.