Foreign Policy: These days when you speak about the surge, you always highlight positive developments but you also appear very cautious. What are your concerns?
Gen. David Petraeus: We are trying to be cautious as we describe the progress that is taking place in Iraq. It has been substantial. We have seen a consistent reduction in the level of violence—a reduction of 60 percent since June, really to a level not seen since the spring of 2005. There has been a corresponding reduction in the loss of civilian lives, Iraqi, and coalition force casualties. Having said all that, it is a fragile achievement, and there are a number of concerns that we do have. We feel as if we've knocked al Qaeda to the canvas, but we know that, like any boxer, they can come back up off that canvas and lend a big, right-hand punch. We also have concerns about the militias and the elements of the [Mahdi Army] militia that have not been honoring Moqtada al-Sadr's cease-fire pledge...
Next - The Belmont Club on recent trends concerning U.S. and Iraqi war casualties.
US deaths in Iraq are at the lowest 3 month total ever . The three month total for October, November and December 2007 is 93. It's also the first time a 3 month total has dropped below 3 digits.
More at both links.
Next - Jules Crittenden (Forward Movement) on casualties and the Gen. Petraeus Q&A in his post Blood Dividend.
... Fewer Americans and Iraqis are dying. The American and Iraqi deaths and injuries in the first half of 2007 bought this calm. Security within which political solutions may be arrived at is achieved in this manner. It is no frivolous accomplishment and nothing to be dismissed or frittered away, because it was bought with the blood of our people. The bitter lesson of history is that walking away ultimately will cost more, whether in Iraq or elsewhere...
Finally - Small Wars Council member LTC Gian Gentile in an Army Times op-ed that provides another view of the Surge.
A group of battle-hardened enlisted infantrymen from the 82nd Airborne Division wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times recently that provided an assessment of the effectiveness of American operations and prospects in Iraq, based on more than 15 months of hard fighting at the local level.
Their view of the situation on the ground in Iraq was essentially the opposite of other assessments that have come out of Baghdad over the last few months...
Comments
Did LTC Gentile dig his piece out of his old files? It reads as if written in late 2006, right around Sept 12 or so, just before Gen. P's visit to DC. My impression is that the data base for his piece is late 2005 to mid-2006 - at least, that's the time frame of the O'Hanlon and the infantrymens' opinion articles in NYT. Whatever the case, I look forward to an item by item comparison of current state of affairs vs. those reported in the NYT by the 82nd fellows in Aug 2006. 18 months seems a good basis for getting beyond the "snapshot" qualities of those midsummer 2006 views in the NYT. Sound suspiciously like election year flak, or at least the beginning of the ballyhoo pointing to the General's March 08 report and recommendations? Yeah, I do, too.
emjayinc:
To answer your question, yes this was an older oped that I had published in the Army Times a few months ago. I emailed the SWJ editors a couple of days ago and asked them to consider posting an oped that I wrote in the current issue of Army Times (7 January 2008) titled "Replacing the Loss" which deals with how families, and commanders, deal with the loss of service members in Iraq (and implicitly Afghanistan). However, in my email to the SWJ editors I was not clear to which oped I was referring to so my sense is that they may have run this older one.
No matter and no worries and as to your point in this posting I agree with what you say as to the need for temporal distance when making assessments of the Surge and your positing of 18 months ahead makes sense to me. My goal when writing the AT oped on the 82nd infantrymen was to highlight what I thought was the importance of their ground/local level perspective and what I saw at the time as a general dismissal of it by the pundits and experts. Their assessment still may have been right; as Malcolm X once said "time will tell."