The Surge: First Fruits
I read this first at Right Nation
I thought I would share it here. The more eyes that see it the better.
The Surge: First Fruits
washingtonpost.com
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, April 13, 2007; A17
(Excerpt)
Link to entire article
By the day, the debate at home about Iraq becomes increasingly disconnected from the realities of the war on the ground. The Democrats in Congress are so consumed with negotiating among their factions the most clever linguistic device to legislatively ensure the failure of the administration’s current military strategy — while not appearing to do so — that they speak almost not at all about the first visible results of that strategy.
And preliminary results are visible. The landscape is shifting in the two fronts of the current troop surge: Anbar province and Baghdad.
The news from Anbar is the most promising. Only last fall, the Marines’ leading intelligence officer there concluded that the United States had essentially lost the fight to al-Qaeda. Yet just this week, the Marine commandant, Gen. James Conway, returned from a four-day visit to the province and reported that we “have turned the corner.”
Why? Because, as Lt. Col. David Kilcullen, the Australian counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. David Petraeus, has written, 14 of the 18 tribal leaders in Anbar have turned against al-Qaeda. As a result, thousands of Sunni recruits are turning up at police stations where none could be seen before. For the first time, former insurgent strongholds such as Ramadi have a Sunni police force fighting essentially on our side.
Discussion Area | Leave Feedback