It’s funny you say that since he’s been embedded from the beginning. I’m glad you trust your own judgment from afar enough to know that someone who is there at the front lines has no idea what is going on.
What I’ve been reading lately from people who are over there has a lot to do with the treatment of the Awakening Council. There seems to be a lot of agreement that the success of Petraeus has been in the ability to work with the tribes. Both Yon and Totten take this to be true, as did this letter that was forwarded to me from a Marine Noncom stationed in Fallujah that I read a while back.
Same shit, different day. I’ve been hearing for 5 years now how things are getting better, and how the strategy du jour is working. Give me some hard facts to show things are getting better, or shut the fuck up.
What makes you think I don’t know the difference? I am asking you what you want to see. How do we derive these facts. Was what Petraeus put forth not good enough for you? What exactly do you want?
Michael Yon is known for taking anything he hears on the street and reporting it as fact - as long as it supports the company line (Bush Administration).
Has he come up with any corroboration about how Al-Qaeda roasts children and feeds them to their parents?
Alright, here are some facts. Even better, not just selective facts cherry-picked to support a single position on the war, but facts about broad measures of the state of Iraq now and the entire history of our invasion.
I think it’s patently obvious that there’s been a significant level of improvement from where we were at many points in the past three years.
You can’t run randomized, controlled experiments on the conduct of war, but I think it’s reasonable to say that this improvement is likely due to some mixture of the following factors:
a. the troop surge
b. improved tactics on our part
c. a belief on the part of insurgents that some reduction of hostilities was in their own best interest, either to entrench their positions, consider pursuing power in the political framework, or simply because they lost fighters, popular support, or resources
To the extent that the improvement was due to the troop surge (and we can’t take it for granted that it was the sole or even most important cause of improvement in Iraq), then I would support continuing an increase in troop numbers relative to the, “baseline,” in 2005 or early 2006.
As Petraeus and others have pointed out, there is a reduced cost in occupying a more stable Iraq. If we can just barely hold Baghdad with 80,000 troops while losing 1,000 troops to violence every year or successfully hold Iraq with 165,000 troops and losing 300 troops to violence every year, I think it’s clear that the “troop surge” strategy is a much better value.
mswas, as I understand it, Great Debates really isn’t the forum to throw things up just because you find them, “interesting.” It makes for a much more interesting board if you bother to articulate a reasoned position and then try to support that postion outside of just quoting the WSJ Opinion Page.
Before the surge began a lot of people agreed that it would lead to a better military position since the insurgents, who are not stupid were going to lay low until it was over. The dispute was about whether there would be an improved political position. Remember, the surge was supposed to be temporary, and it is looking more and more permanent. Do we have reconciliation? Do we have an Iraqi army and police force who can stand on their own? Do we have a reasonable infrastructure yet? Notice, that even after the surge, the insurgents had no problem shelling the green zone.
There is also the minor problem of where the troops are coming from, and the danger that we won’t have the resources to meet other threats - in Afghanistan or elsewhere.
The surge seems to me like the screwup at the very beginning of the war - a lot of attention to the force part of the equation, which went well, but not enough to the political side. We did an excellent and successful surge into Iraq five years ago, and look what happened.
An opinion piece from the WSJ is usually the equivalent to a worthless one.
Just when I see them claiming that Iraqis have increasing support for us being there (what? from 30% to 31% is good enough then to increase the surge?) they lost me.
And missing evidence that Sunni tribesmen will drop any support to us when money does not come their way, and the Maliki fiasco in Basra is enough for me to declare that that opinion piece manages to be even worse than a worthless opinion.
More grounded in reality opinions then are needed.