‘No Victory Dances’

The most telling thing to me is that people in August are back out at midnight on the streets.
Well, I mean, that's one. There's a whole host of these [indicators] ... The insurance rates for aircraft coming into Baghdad International Airport have been cut by half ... Two weeks ago there were licenses let for outside the Green Zone, a five-star hotel, a shopping mall and a commercial center in three different locations in Baghdad.

In a way you could argue that with an enemy like Al Qaeda, victory's never going to be absolute, you're never going to wipe out every last one so it's really about whether you've reached a tipping point where they don't affect society.
Security gains, obviously, help with everything. Everything is much more doable, much more possible. But still, again, we're not celebrating; the champagne bottle remains in the back of the refrigerator. There's no victory dances in the end zone because every time you start to feel really good, there will be some kind of incident. There will be a suicide-vest attack, there will be a car-bomb attack or what have you. And we have to stay very, very focused. We talk sometimes about having our teeth into the jugular of Al Qaeda, and we got to keep them there. Because they're still out there. And to some degree on the Shia side we've seen the same thing with the [Shia] militias there. As the Al Qaeda threat to the Shia neighborhoods and Shia populations has been so significantly reduced ... there's not the need for them that the population, perhaps, felt before. And so the people don't want the militias to come back either.

And now Moqtada al-Sadr says he has become a social worker.
Yeah, yeah. And again, if you look at what the militia was and what he's trying to transform it into, you have to see that as a positive step.

In some ways, Iraqi leaders are getting a bit nationalistic—resisting foreign investment in oil, delaying the Status of Forces Agreement [SOFA] with the United States.
It's probably to be predicted. What you see is a degree of self confidence that wasn't present before. And you also see a government that's been in place now for well over two years. The first year was marked by such extraordinary violence that they really found it difficult to get much done ... If you think back to June of 2007, there were 180 attacks a day on average, and there's now about 25 or so attacks in a day [Iraq-wide]. It's just such an enormous difference.

Is that new Iraqi self-confidence going to make it even harder to conclude the SOFA? And do you think that's going to be done before you leave?
I think that's all doable. There are sufficient areas of very important mutual interest that will enable the conclusion of an agreement. Iraqis know that ... while their security forces are increasingly capable, there are still significant gaps and shortcomings.

Many Iraqi political leaders are insisting on a timetable as part of this.
If you look at the serious statements; if you look at, let's say, what Prime Minister [Nuri al-]Maliki's spokesman has said, even when he's used a date, he has always used the words "hope," prior to the date. And then he's used words such as "conditions permitting" or "subject to conditions" following any date. So there's a recognition of reality, but there's also a need to play to domestic politics here.

Looking forward to Afghanistan, are you going to take a lot of what we learned here and make changes there?
Well, I think it would be premature to make that kind of statement. In fact, the big lesson I think you take away from any experience like this is how unique each situation is. Now, it does happen that I was just over in Afghanistan for two and a half days … this last week. And there clearly are significant challenges by no means all of which can be solved within Afghanistan; the extremism that emanates from the [Pakistani] border areas is a very serious threat, and it appears to be a growing threat.

There have been some days when Afghanistan's had more violent incidents than Iraq.
That has certainly been the case in many days in recent months ... One of the assessments that I presented to [Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in 2005] was a sense that Afghanistan was going to be the longest campaign of what was then called "The Long War." And I think that's still very much true. There may be certain aspects of the experience in Iraq that can help inform the refinements to the campaign there. But again, it would be premature on the basis of having spent two and a half days there in the last three years to state what those might be.

Will there be an Afghan surge?
Again, it would be premature. As [Defense Secretary Robert] Gates and others have all noted, there's clearly a need for additional forces, given the pressure the insurgents have exerted in this year in particular.

I guess you can't comment on the U.S. presidential …
No, I'd rather not. [Laughs.]

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