Good to see a pragmatic humble guy (who thinks of the adversary's point of view and shows some basic respect) finally in power instead of loudmouth dummies for most of the past 8 years. If Petraeus was in charge from the beginning, there probably wouldn't have been a war in the first place. As he says, you have to separate those who you can work with from those who you can't. Saddam basically wanted to stay in power and was a guy who the US could have worked with (he was after all a former "our bastard"). The guy basically bent over backwards by destroying his WMDs in the early 1990s (as it has now been proven). This was was completely unnecessary. With some basic respect and reciprocity, the Saddam threat could have been diffused if a guy like Patraeus was in power then. Lousy loudmouth saber-rattling diplomacy after 9/11 created an unnecessary war which has stolen billions of dollars from future generations (as this administration didn't even have the balls to make people pay for it, passing the buck in the form of massive deficits to others who did not make the decision but are now faced to pay for them (these are the children of America who will have to pay the debt off)
‘No Victory Dances’
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Could there have been
an Awakening
without the surge?
Well, there could have been an Awakening, but you couldn't have exploited it ... And by the way, in the course of our surge of 30,000, the Iraqis surged by over 130,000 actually, and climbing. The Sons of Iraq [armed Sunni neighborhood volunteers], the Awakening, that's another 99,000 now. You know, we had tribal Awakenings all the way back to early 2005, actually, but they ended up with their heads chopped off. The one that endured, of course, was the one that sprung up with Sheik Sattar out by Ramadi in October of 2006. You started to see a downward trend in violence but the [military] clearance of Ramadi didn't take place until mid-March through mid-April of 2007. And in a number of cases you had to clear it first, or at least you had to be started on that road before they would dare to raise their hand and say that they were willing to help protect their country, or their neighborhood.
Beyond that, I think there was an intellectual construct. You know, it wasn't just "the surge." It wasn't just extra forces. It was the kind of conceptual guidance that was put out at the same time that we employed the additional forces ... starting with a focus on securing the population, which can only be done by living among them.
[Another] intellectual construct was ... an explicit idea that we have to identify and separate the irreconcilables from the reconcilables, but that you're not going to kill your way out of an insurgency; you got to reconcile with as many as you can. That helps guide you, and that leads to, at the local level, political reconciliation and Awakenings, and then also you're looking to see, as the security situation allows, people start focusing on laws and budgets and all the rest of that. It takes a very comprehensive approach.
Just back to Al Qaeda a little bit. Why so shy about declaring victory over them, if they're in such bad shape?
Well, first of all we truly think it would be premature, honestly. And then I think there still is a very lethal and very deadly and very barbaric enemy out there. Again, sufficiently barbaric to strap [explosive] vests onto women.
Which in a way is a sign of their weakness, too. They can't find enough men to do it.
Well, yeah, you can interpret it that way. We'll let you do that. And again, honestly, [U.S.] Ambassador [Ryan] Crocker and I explicitly, from day one, together, said that we have got to be coldly realistic and as absolutely objective as we possibly can and not let our enthusiasms or perhaps normal optimism creep into our assessments, frankly. And so we've been very, very careful to ensure that what we say is as absolutely credible as we can make it, and also not open up the assessments to charges of spinning.
But do you see any element of Iraqi society now that's pro Al Qaeda? I mean, you used to have Sunni political leaders who were openly so.
There are some that are surviving, you know, in Syria or Jordan still. There are some that still talk a bit about resistance, but even that has actually sort of become yesterday's news, I think. They are much more the old line, what you would call the hard-core Baathists and Saddamists rather than religious extremists.
You no longer hear of Sunni imams in the mosques praising Al Qaeda in Iraq.
We actually don't, come to think of it. You know, by the way, what you have just raised is an interesting point. I don't know how you can capture it, but progress in Iraq often is, in a sense, a negative. It is something that is no longer there. Remember how last year at this time you would see two-mile-long lines or mile-long lines for gas stations? Well, when you see those, you realize there's a problem. When you don't see them, you don't realize there's not a problem, you just don't see them. There are so many areas like that ... But again, you need to be cautious about that, too, because as the ambassador and I have in fact cautioned on a number of occasions that, yes, there has been significant progress, but it is still not self sustaining; there is still a degree of fragility to it, and it could be reversed.
Discuss