Mr. President, it’s been only a year since General David Petraeus arrived in Baghdad and took command of American forces in Iraq. But in these brief 12 months, he and the American Coalition troops under his command have brought about a tectonic shift in Iraq that has altered the course of the war there, and with the future of at least two great nations–Iraq and the United States of America–and the lives of hundreds of millions of people in those two nations and so many others threatened by violent jihadist terrorists in the Middle East and beyond. Mr. President, when the surge first began a year ago, many doubted that the violence then raging in Iraq could be brought under control. Even as American troops began implementing this bold new counterinsurgency strategy, some opponents of the war inside and outside of Congress declared that the war in Iraq was already lost, that the surge had already been tried and failed, and that it mattered more, frankly, that we get out of Iraq than that we succeed in Iraq. They could not have been more wrong.