Iraq Progress Report Dog & Pony Show: Day 1

Shaun,
While I respect that you hold the General in a high regard, if it's possible you need to separate the man from his public statements about the war. As I note on Why We Worry, Petraeus has a long history of espousing the administration line on Iraq, way before he was asked to lead our effort there. Somehow every month we were making great progress toward victory according to the General, despite increasing violence and no political reconciliation in sight.

We need to take Petraeus's words with a heavy dose of skepticism.

ChrisWWW:

You are correct.

What I should have said that I hold Petraeus in high regard as a commander, troop motivator and someone whose knowledge of how to fight an insurgency has been belatedly invaluable.

Beyond those things he is indeed a mouthpiece, but then so were his predecessors, and none had his skills.

Glad to see we agree :-)

"Beyond those things he is indeed a mouthpiece, but then so were his predecessors, and none had his skills."

Actually I think his COIN skills are vastly overrated. Paying people not to kill other people isn't a very good long term strategy.

After watching CSPAN all day I am still persuaded that we should begin a process of reducing our military presence in Iraq while increasing our diplomatic and humanitarian efforts. I think that it would motivate the factions in Iraq to move towards reconciliation..

We have no policy because there is no one there we would like to leave in charge. There are dozens of different factions, each of which is either too fundemental, too bloodthirsty, too anti-american, or some combination of those three. Killing them won't work because that only works if you have someone to hand over the reigns to when you're done killing. But we don't. Basically we have this mythical "Iraqi Gov't" that just needs our help in putting down the insurgency so they can live in peace. The reality is there is no gov't worth mentioning, and all the armed grps, every single one of them, are insurgents of one stripe or another. There is no spoon.