Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds with some reminders:

* Obama hand picked McChrystal!
* During the 2008 election cycle the Far Left called Gen. Petraeus “General Betrayus.” But now MoveOn has, well, moved on. I guess Obama gets a pass from them on that. (Flashback of this great parody of MoveOn — General LiesandPower.)
* Hillary Clinton questioned Petraeus’ character.

In a matter of about three weeks, the Left’s view of Afghanistan has gone from “the good war” to “the next Vietnam.” This turnabout — in effect, the Left is dumping the war now that it has stopped being politically useful — deserves an honored place in the annals of bad faith. Meantime, our troops in the field are still fighting.

In an unsparing 66-page assessment, commanding general Stanley McChrystal warns of failure unless he gets more troops quickly for a counterinsurgency campaign to protect the population and to thwart the enemy’s momentum. McChrystal is President Obama’s hand-picked general, selected to carry out the “comprehensive” counterinsurgency strategy that Obama announced in March. But the White House now acts as if it barely knew its own four-star and had not heard of his strategy.

It is understandable that Obama wants to be deliberate in committing perhaps tens of thousands more troops to the field, but his change of tune, away from his formerly approved strategy and the stalwart rhetoric (“the necessary war”) of a few months ago, indicates fecklessness or political calculation or both.

If we want to keep al-Qaeda from reestablishing a base in parts of Afghanistan and militants from regaining the initiative in neighboring Pakistan, there is no alternative to defeating the Taliban and associated insurgencies in Afghanistan, and that will require manpower. Obama’s political advisers hate the war, and Vice President Biden is selling a characteristically unrealistic plan to fight it from afar. Obama should resist the urge to flinch.

– National Review’s: The Week.($)

Bruce Riedel and Michael O’Hanlon explain in USA Today why the strategy of “offshoring” operations in Afghanistan, championed by many on the Left and some on the right, most recently George Will, will not work. The Offshoring is essentially counterterrorism, a strategy more reactionary based where the U.S. relies on technology and human assets not physically in Afghanistan. Riedel and O’Hanlon argue that counterinsurgency — boots on the ground interacting with the local population — is the only strategy for success, or at least a chance for success, in Afghanistan.

Here’s why:

The fundamental reason that a counterterrorism-focused strategy fails is that it cannot generate good intelligence. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban know not to use their cellphones and satellite phones today, so our spy satellites are of little use in finding extremists. We need information from unmanned low-altitude aircraft and, even more, from people on the ground who speak the language and know the comings and goings of locals. But our Afghan friends who might be inclined to help us with such information would be intimidated by insurgent and terrorist forces into silence — or killed if they cooperated — because we would lack the ability to protect them under a counterterrorism approach.

Afghan forces simply do not have the capacity to do the protecting themselves at this point and, given the challenges of building up new institutions in Afghanistan after decades of war, will not have the ability until at least 2012. Even that distant date will be postponed further if we do not deploy enough forces to mentor and partner with Afghans as they build up an army and police force largely from scratch. This adds up to a prescription for a drying up of intelligence.

The second reason a counterterrorism-oriented strategy would fail is that, if we tried it, we would likely lose our ability to operate unmanned aircraft where the Taliban and al-Qaeda prefer to hide. Why? If we pulled out, the Afghan government would likely collapse. The secure bases near the mountains of the Afghan-Pakistan border, and thus our ability to operate aircraft from them, would be lost. Our ability to go after Afghan resistance fighters would deteriorate. And the recent momentum we have established in going after Pakistani extremists would be lost.

For those who have forgotten the realities of the 1990s — when we tried to go after Osama bin Laden without access to nearby bases by using ships based in the Indian Ocean — the two- to four-hour flight times of drones and cruise missiles operating off such ships made prompt action to real-time intelligence impractical.

Third, we would likely lose our allies with this approach. A limited mission offers nothing to the Afghans, whose country is essentially abandoned to the Taliban, or to the Pakistanis, who would similarly see this as the first step toward cut and run. The NATO allies would also smell in a “reduced” mission the beginning of withdrawal; some if not most might try to beat us to the exit.

Once the Taliban is back in power in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda will not be far behind. Our top nemesis will be able to salvage a victory in the very place from which it launched the 9/11 attacks eight years ago. Al-Qaeda will have its favorite bases and sanctuaries back, as well as a major propaganda win.

New Alliances In Iraq Cross Sectarian Lines
Political Jockeying Suggests An Emerging Axis of Power

By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, March 20, 2009; A01

BAGHDAD, March 19 — Six weeks after provincial elections, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has allied himself with an outspoken Sunni leader in several provinces and broached a coalition with a militant, anti-American cleric, suggesting the emergence of a new axis of power in Iraq centered on a strong central government and nationalism.

Negotiations are still underway in most provinces, distrust remains entrenched among nearly all the players, and agreements could crumble. But the jockeying after the Jan. 31 elections indicates that politicians are assembling coalitions that cross the sectarian divide ahead of parliamentary elections later this year, a vote that will shape the country as the U.S. military withdraws.

“There is a new political map,” said Anwar al-Luheibi, a Sunni adviser to Maliki, who is a Shiite. “And I anticipate this map will be far better than the one we had before.”

The negotiations and dealmaking mark a departure from politics that have hewed almost exclusively to ethnic and sectarian lines, fomenting the discord that brought Iraq to the precipice of civil war in 2006 and 2007. They represent the first round of a great game that may resolve a question unanswered since Saddam Hussein’s fall in 2003: What coalition of interests will find the formula to wield power in Iraq from Baghdad?

What’s significant about this article? First is that The Washington Post actually bothered to publish any good Iraq news on page one. Had McCain won the presidency one wonders if that would have been the case. But even more significant is that it undercuts the pre-war notions championed by the Central Intelligence Agency and State Department that “externals” or Iraqi exiles and exile groups would never have the popular support needed to lead the country after Saddam Hussein’s removal from power.

In his memoirs, Former Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith labeled the notion a “prejudice” against externals. What’s interesting is that neither the State Department, nor especially the CIA, had any factual evidence to support their claim. It started prior to the War in Afghanistan when a former CIA operative named Milton Bearden made the argument in a end of year 2001 Foreign Affairs magazine that the U.S. should not utilize the Northern Alliance because they were seen as too outcast in the eyes of common Afghans. Feith reminds us that “our partnership with the Northern Alliance neither pushed the Pashtun tribes into the Taliban’s arms nor rekindled a civil war” that Bearden and others argued would occur.

Fast forward in time to the debate on the Iraq War. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage moved preemptively to disenfranchise whatever possible voice Iraqi externals might have when he shut down the Information Collection Program, the program with which the Iraqi National Congress (INC) provided American intelligence services with both physical and human intelligence (spies). The INC was the most prominent of Iraqi external groups, but it was headed by Ahmed Chalabi, who decided in the mid-1990s to follow through with a CIA-prepared coup attempt against Saddam Hussein, even though the Clinton administration pulled U.S. (and CIA) backing right after learning about it. Fortunately the Defense Department would later start the ICP back up. Even so, Armitage continued to argue that the externals in Iraq had less “weight” than, say, in Afghanistan.

According to Feith, “This was a momentous conclusion to reach on the basis of a vague metaphor — without supporting evidence.”

In light of the insurgency, it is remarkable that key U.S. officials believed that the Iraqi externals were the chief danger the United States had to guard against in post-Saddam Iraq. Yet the main idea behind the transitional civil authority was precisely to guard against the externals dominating the post-Saddam political scene in Iraq.Why should that have been a goal of U.S. policy at all? When challenged on this point, top State and CIA officials responded that all the leaders of the external groups were not skilled enough and, moreover, lacked legitimacy.

Calling this view “presumptuous and dangerous,” Feith remarks that within a few short years after Saddam’s removal those very external leaders were indeed elected by popular majority to rule Iraq, which “belies the influential CIA theory — one might call a prejudice — that the externals would be incapable of winning electoral support inside Iraq.”

The leaders included:

President Jalal Talabani (elected and reelected)
Prime Minister Iyad Allawi (appointed in June 2004… later elected twice to parliament)
Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi
Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari
Abdulaziz el-Hakim (leader of Iraq’s main Shia political party)

In light of the Washington Post article last week (that began this post), one wonders at what point the CIA and State Department will ever concede their inaccuracy. If ever.

Then again, since we’re keeping score, it appears that the Obama Administration’s declaration that we’ll “save” money by “ending” a war in Iraq that appears already won — or at least won with continued management started by General David Petraeus — is far off base, as the Government Accountability Office (GAO) concluded recently that will “increase rather than lower Iraq-related expenditures during the withdrawal and for several years after its completion,” according to the report.

Finally, who was right or wrong and on what argument will become all for naught should this foolish release of detainees from Iraqi prisons occur with too much haste or without proper vetting. This report seems the equivalent of our border catch-and-release program, despite the gains of our surge, dangerous men such as Mohammed Ali Mourad are let go either by incompetence or for more nefarious reasons.

In other words, victory and defeat in Iraq can be a somewhat self-fulfilling prophecy.

Tom Ricks of The Washington Post has a feature regarding the trials and tribulations (and political b.s.) that General David Petraeus had to go through. It’s worth the read. Here’s an excerpt:

Petraeus and [U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan] Crocker liked to go running together, and during their runs in the summer of 2007 they spent considerable time talking about how they would handle their joint appearance before Congress in September. It was Petraeus’s calculation that the debate in the United States over the war was stalemated, especially over the consequences of a troop pullout from Iraq.

For months, congressional Democrats had expected the hearings to be a decisive moment in the war. Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.) had said in May, “If we don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel, September is going to be a very bleak month for this administration.”

Even some Republican allies of Bush agreed that the Iraq strategy was doomed. But Col. Steve Boylan, Petraeus’s communications adviser, believed that congressional Democrats, not the general and the president, were the ones in a bind.

“My feeling was that Congress wouldn’t be able to put together enough votes to override a presidential veto, because then they’d own it,” he said, putting his finger on the Democrats’ basic dilemma: how to end the war without being blamed for how it ended.

Petraeus and Crocker were determined to deliver a sober assessment of the situation in Iraq that would not open them up to the charges of blind optimism that had undermined the credibility of past officials. At the Pentagon, Boylan set up a “murder board” to help Petraeus rehearse the weekend before his testimony. Boylan’s most pointed question was “Sir, explain to me why we have to lose one more American life in Iraq.”

Petraeus responded, “Okay, what’s your answer?”

Boylan didn’t have one — but he wanted Petraeus to think about it.

On Sept. 10, the day the hearings began, MoveOn.org, an antiwar group influential in the Democratic Party, ran its now-famous full-page advertisement in the New York Times mocking Petraeus as “General Betray Us.” Petraeus, the ad charged, was “at war with the facts.” And the facts, as MoveOn saw them, showed that “the surge strategy has failed.” In addition, it said, “General Petraeus will not admit what everyone knows: Iraq is mired in an unwinnable religious civil war.”

That morning, Rapp rode with Petraeus in a car from Fort Belvoir, near George Washington’s home at Mount Vernon, to the Capitol. “Petraeus did a good job of not showing it, but I know it stung,” he said. “He was just a little quieter than usual.”

Crocker, the lifelong diplomat, took an unemotional approach. “I couldn’t believe it,” he said. As he read the ad again, his disbelief gave way to a grim smile. “They’ve screwed themselves,” he thought. He knew what Petraeus planned to say, and that it would amount to a “word-by-word rebuttal of that allegation.”

One would hope that such short-sighted erroneous nonsense from MoveOn.org would forever discard them to the ash heap of history, but probably not. At least the Post deserves some credit for highlighting their slanted stupidity.

Why the Surge Worked
By MATTHEW KAMINSKI

Earlier this week in Baghdad, Gen. David Petraeus took a final bow before leaving for his new job atop U.S. Central Command. Over the past 20 months, the outgoing military chief in Iraq oversaw a new strategy and “surge” of five brigades that turned American war fortunes around. Back in Washington, a retired four-star general little known outside the Beltway or the military could claim a chunk of credit for this success, too.
[The Weekend Interview] Terry Shoffner

Not that Jack Keane would. Public attention, such as his front-page photograph in the Washington Post last week, makes him uneasy — a sentiment that he expresses with a bluff New York accent and no sign of false modesty. A close friend and mentor to Gen. Petraeus, he talks down his contribution to the Iraq war effort: “Minimal,” “just another set of eyes,” “given more credit than I deserved in all of that.”

Talk to others, however, and the unusual and critical role he played these past two years becomes clear. Gen. Keane helped conceive the new Iraq war strategy and then sell it to the White House. He advised on its implementation, visiting Iraq often and reporting back to the president and vice president. As recounted in Bob Woodward’s new book, “The War Within,” George W. Bush stiffed his Joint Chiefs of Staff, who opposed the surge, and made Gen. Keane his back channel to the Petraeus command in Baghdad. The Pentagon “almost presided over an American defeat in Iraq, and Jack Keane helped save the day,” says Michael O’Hanlon, a scholar at the Brookings Institution.

Born into an English-Irish family in Manhattan, Gen. Keane was raised on the Yankees and went up to Fordham for college. In his 37 years in the military he served in Vietnam, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo. Iraq was another story. Soon after Baghdad fell he noted “a little bit of arrogance,” and says he and other senior military leaders “let down” their political masters by failing to anticipate that Saddam Hussein’s loyalists made preparations for the insurgency.

Three months into the war, Gen. Keane visited Iraq as the Army’s deputy chief of staff. “I felt we had a low-level insurgency on our hands and I had a long plane ride home as a result of it, because I thought my Army was ill-prepared to fight that kind of war and it would take time for us to figure it out.” His was a lonely view at the time. Gen. Keane passed on a promotion to Army chief for personal reasons but kept up with Iraq.

For the next three years, Donald Rumsfeld and the senior generals pushed a “short-war” scenario, “which was to get a political solution quickly, transition to the Iraqis security quickly, and get out,” says Gen. Keane. “It didn’t work. And why didn’t it work? Because the enemy voted and they took advantage. The fact that we did not adjust to what the enemy was doing to us and the Iraqis were not capable of standing by themselves — that was our major failure. . . . It took us all a while to understand the war and [that] we had the wrong strategy to fight it. Where I parted from those leaders [at the Pentagon] is when we knew the facts — and the facts were pretty evident in 2005 and compelling in 2006 — and those facts were simply that we could not protect the population and the levels of violence were just out of control.”

In late 2006, after the midterm election debacle for Republicans, pressure rose for a quick if dishonorable exit from Iraq. Gen. Keane met Frederick Kagan, who was putting together a report on an alternative strategy for Iraq at the American Enterprise Institute. On Dec. 11, both men found themselves at the White House to push the plan. Congress, the Joint Chiefs, Iraq commander Gen. George Casey and the Iraq Study Group all wanted a fast drawdown. President Bush ignored their advice. Gen. Petraeus was sent out in February to oversee the new, risky and politically unpopular surge.

Even Gen. Keane didn’t expect the new strategy to work so fast. “It’s a stunning turnaround, and I think people will study it for years because it’s unparalleled in counterinsurgency practice,” he says. “All the gains we’ve achieved against al Qaeda, the Sunni insurgency, the Iranians in the south are sustainable” — a slight pause here — “if we’re smart about it and not let them regroup and get back into it.”

Gen. Keane wants to make sure people understand why the surge worked. “I have a theory” about the unexpectedly fast turnaround, he says. “Whether they be Sunni, Shia or Kurd, anyone who was being touched by that war after four years was fed up with it. And I think once a solution was being provided, once they saw the Americans were truly willing to take risks and die to protect their women and children and their way of life, they decided one, to protect the Americans, and two, to turn in the enemies that were around them who were intimidating and terrorizing them; that gave them the courage to do it.”

He adds that the so-called Sunni Awakening, and the effective surrender of Shia radical Moqtada Sadr and his Mahdi Army, depended upon the surge. “I’m not sure [the Sunni Awakening] would have spread to the other provinces without the U.S. [military] presence. We needed forces that we didn’t previously have for the Sunnis to be able to rely on us to protect them.” Sadr saw his lieutenants killed in the American push, and didn’t want to share their fate.

Looking ahead, Gen. Keane still considers a robust American ground force “the secret to success” in Iraq. “It is a myth for people to assert that by pulling away from the Iraqis, by pulling away from the Iraqi political process, that somehow that becomes a catalyst to do things that they would not do because of our presence. That is fundamentally wrong. It is our presence that is helping Iraqis move forward.”

In his view, the U.S. ought to focus on cementing recent gains. First comes helping the Sunnis back into the political system. The majority Shiite government hasn’t yet agreed to hold provincial elections later this year, and until it does and those polls are held, the U.S. can’t withdraw any more troops, he says.

Sectarian tensions remain a worry. Last month in the northeastern city of Baquba, government forces detained 1,000 Sunnis, mostly members of the Sons of Iraq, a nationwide militia funded by the U.S. and composed of many former Sunni insurgents. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki promised to vet and take a fifth of the 90,000-strong force into his security services, but as with the provincial elections, he hasn’t yet delivered. “It appears that Maliki is using the guise of security to enhance his political base and to diminish his political opponents,” says Gen. Keane, citing the Baquba incident. “That is a danger and that is something we should not tolerate.”

Another potential threat looms from Iran. Though Tehran and its surrogates were hammered in the Maliki government’s successful spring offensive on Basra, “we know they’re coming back,” says Gen. Keane. Iran wants a weak Iraqi central government unaligned with America. “We know that they intend to come back on the kinetic side, attack U.S. forces exclusively with less attacks, but more spectacular. I don’t believe for a minute they’re going to be able to resurge and be successful as long as we stay on top of it, keep our head in the game, maintain our force presence in the south.”

The surge turned things around on another difficult front, Washington. “Despite the fact that President Bush did preside over a strategy that was failing for three plus years, and he has been criticized for that,” says Gen. Keane, “he also deserves a significant amount of credit because all around him people were advocating a failed strategy, particularly key leaders around him, and he had the wherewithal to make a tough decision that flew certainly in the face of political opposition even in his own party.”

Gen. Keane says he understands why there was resentment among the Joint Chiefs at seeing the president change course against their wishes and follow a retired general’s recommendations on strategy and staffing in a war zone. But he considers his role perfectly appropriate. “In my mind, I think a president has a right to seek advice and counsel any place he chooses,” he says. “I certainly wasn’t forcing myself on them.”

The U.S. came “within weeks or months” of defeat in Iraq in 2006, he says. The consequences of that were “unacceptable” for the region, “not to speak of an institution that I loved.” And what about the military chiefs who thought the extra battalions and extended service tours would be too much of a strain on American forces? “When people talk about stress and strain on a force, the stress and strain that would come from having to live with a humiliating defeat would be quite staggering.”

As for any suggestions that he’s the other general who saved the U.S. from such a failure in Iraq, Gen. Keane waves them away. “To be frank about it, given the talents of Gen. Petraeus and the talent that he had around him on his own staff, if I look back on it and am honest with myself, they would have accomplished all the same results if I had never gone to Iraq.”

Here’s William McGurn with another great commentary, this time regarding all those pre-emptive pessimists and the Iraqi civil war that never was. I guess that’s a dangerous boast, as a President Obama could yank out our forces and that civil war might occur. But no less dangerous a boast than those who used the term without due evidence.

If the editors of the New York Times changed the paper’s line on Iraq and no one called them on it, would it make a noise? Like the proverbial tree falling in an empty forest?

Something of the kind seems to have happened to the Times use of “civil war” to describe the conflict in Iraq. In the fall of 2006, the Times began insisting Iraq was in a civil war. And in the year that followed, the paper’s editorials routinely castigated George W. Bush for refusing to acknowledge it.

Here’s a small sample:

• Nov. 29, 2006: “At this point, it’s hard to tell who is more out of touch: President Bush, who continues to insist that Iraq has not descended into civil war, or Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki . . .”
• Jan. 11, 2007 (the day after the president announced the surge): “The nation needs an eyes-wide-open recognition that the only goal left is to get the U.S. military out of this civil war in a way that could minimize the slaughter of Iraqis and reduce the chances that the chaos Mr. Bush unleashed will engulf Iraq’s neighbors.”
• March 27, 2007: “As disjointed as the Democrats have been, their approach makes far more sense than Mr. Bush’s denial of Iraq’s civil war . . .”
• July 8, 2007: “One of Mr. Bush’s arguments against withdrawal is that it would lead to civil war. The war is raging, right now, and it may take years to burn out.”
• Oct. 23, 2007: “If [the Bush administration] doesn’t now move quickly [on Turkey's threat to cross the border to attack Kurdish rebels], Iraq’s disastrous civil war could spiral into an even bigger disaster — a regional war.”

And these are only a smattering of what by my count are at least 16 editorials from November 2006 to November 2007 all unequivocally asserting an Iraqi civil war.

As someone who was in Mr. Bush’s speechwriting shop at the time, I remember the horrible stories coming out of Iraq — Sunni men kidnapped and killed by Shia death squads; Shia innocents murdered by Sunnis; Kurds being driven from their homes, and so on. The violence was real, it reflected religious divisions, and on the face of it, civil war was a reasonable description.

So why did the president resist the characterization? The answer is that he resisted using “civil war” for the same reason the Times likely embraced it: It was a loaded term.

If the conflict in Iraq was really a civil war, the implication was, first, that the United States had no place being there; second, that it was hopeless. That’s one reason at least five of the editorials that used the words “civil war” also used the word “unending” or “unwinnable.” If you find yourself in the middle of a civil war that is unwinnable, logic allows for only one conclusion: Pull out.

This, in fact, is the same logic that MoveOn.org invoked in the ad the Times infamously ran the day Gen. David Petraeus testified before Congress. Remove the inflammatory “General Betray Us” language, and the MoveOn argument was pretty much what the Times had been saying: The U.S. was in the middle of an “unwinnable religious civil war,” and our leaders were in denial.

MoveOn.org and the Times, of course, weren’t alone. In what Keith Olbermann described as a “Walter Cronkite moment,” NBC News in November 2006 also branded Iraq a civil war. On air later that same evening, NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell cited experts who were saying that calling the conflict a civil war “could further erode public support for keeping U.S. troops in Iraq.”

Yet now NBC too has stopped using civil war. Which earlier this year prompted Ed Gillespie, a senior White House staffer, to send a letter to NBC News President Steve Capus. “Is it still NBC News’s carefully deliberated opinion that Iraq is in the midst of a civil war?” Mr. Gillespie asked. “If not, will the network publicly declare that the civil war has ended, or that it was wrong to declare it in the first place?”

Good question, and one worth asking the Times. The fact is, though some of its columnists call Iraq a civil war, the Times hasn’t run an editorial saying so since last November. Could that editorial silence be the Gray Lady’s way of admitting a mistake? If I were the president, I think I’d take that as a “yes.”

Good commentary by William McGurn

When Abraham Lincoln famously sent word to Gen. George McClellan that he’d like to “borrow” the army if the general wasn’t planning on using it, the commander of Union forces likely did not take it kindly. McClellan, after all, was a man whose letters home referred to Lincoln as an “idiot,” “a well-meaning baboon” and other colorful language.

In the first few pages of “The War Within,” Bob Woodward opens with another presidential remark that offended another wartime general. This time the recipient was the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Gen. George Casey. During a videoconference with Baghdad, the president said, “George, we’re not playing for a tie. I want to make sure we all understand this.” Gen. Casey, Mr. Woodward writes, took this as “an affront to his dignity that he would long remember.”

Whether or not Gen. Casey long remembered, “The War Within” makes clear his disdain for his commander in chief. If the views and remarks attributed to Gen. Casey are not accurate, Mr. Woodward has done him a grave injustice. If they are accurate, they come as further evidence of the obstacles President George W. Bush had to overcome to get his commanders to start winning in Iraq.

Opening with Gen. Casey also says something about Mr. Woodward. There’s a case, I suppose, for using the general who opposed the surge to open what is hailed as the definitive account of that surge (not to mention using Robert McNamara, the Defense secretary who helped lose Vietnam to end the book). Surely, however, that would be the same case for wrapping the definitive account of the strategy that brought Robert E. Lee to Appomattox around Gen. McClellan.

Gen. Casey, after all, was the commander who all along maintained that the solution in Iraq was for America to draw down its forces — even after the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra. He was the commander who later that year was given his own chance to secure Baghdad with Operations Together Forward I and II, and failed. Most of all, he is the commander who was wrong when the president was right to insist that Baghdad could be secured and al Qaeda dealt a harsh blow with more troops.

Gen. Casey’s continued adherence to a failed strategy does not make him a dishonorable man. It does make him an odd choice to serve as the foundation for the charge that the president was out of touch with the war. As evidence, both the general and the journalist point to questions about how many of the enemy we were killing as a sign that “the president did not get it.”

Then again, maybe it’s Gen. Casey and Mr. Woodward who did not get it. The questions the president asked were driven by something everyone in the West Wing worried about. Every night for years, Americans tuning into the evening news were greeted by the same image from Iraq: a burning car or Humvee, accompanied by a fresh report about soldiers or Marines who’d been blown up by an improvised explosive device or suicide bomb.

Nor did these images exist in a vacuum. A media obsessed with body counts featured grim roll calls of the dead, marking each macabre “milestone” — 1,500 war dead, 2,000 war dead — along the way. In this context, was it really unreasonable for a president to ask his commander on the ground if we were fighting back, when it sure didn’t look that way to the American people?

The same might be said of the one truly original take offered by Mr. Woodward. This is his curious assertion that it’s not the surge that has produced the great reduction in violence in Iraq. The reduced violence, he says, is the result of the increased lethality of covert operations against terrorist leaders and operatives.

Which brings up two interesting points. First, we are led to find fault with a president allegedly obsessed with a “kill the bastards” approach to Iraq. But then we are asked to accept that the reason we’re now seeing success in Iraq because we’re . . . killing the bastards.

Second, the surge was a shift in mission, not simply an addition of five brigades. Until the surge, we had pursued a political solution, hoping that the answer to Iraq was the rise of a democratic government that would persuade Iraqis to come together for their future. The surge, by contrast, finally recognized the obvious: Until Iraqis started feeling safe in their own homes and neighborhoods, there would be no compromise or rebuilding.

Sophisticates have never liked Mr. Bush for his preference for words like “win” and “victory” to describe what America is trying to do in Iraq. And if Mr. Woodward’s latest contribution is any clue, they’ll never forgive him for doing something even worse: proving it can be done.

[WSJ] For U.S. politics, it is worth recalling that that 2006 Washington Post story became part of a Beltway consensus that defeat in Iraq was inevitable. Democrats made withdrawal the center of their campaign to retake Congress, Republicans like Senator John Warner became media darlings for saying the war couldn’t be won, and the James Baker-Lee Hamilton Iraq Study Group laid out a bipartisan road to retreat. According to memos disclosed Sunday in the New York Times, even senior officials at the State Department and Pentagon opposed the surge. President Bush, heeding Generals David Petraeus and Ray Odierno as well as John McCain, overruled the defeatists and ordered a renewed U.S. commitment to Iraq.

The Anbar handover is above all a tribute to the hundreds of Americans who have fought and died in places like Fallujah, Ramadi and Hit over these last five years. Over the horizon of history, we tend to recall only the successes in previous wars at such places as Guadalcanal, Peleliu and the Chosin Reservoir. We forget that those wars and battles were also marked by terrible blunders and setbacks, both political and military. What mattered is that our troops, and our country, had the determination to fight to an ultimate victory. So it is with the heroes of Anbar.

Remember that Iraqi civil war? Me neither. Why? It never happened.

These days the perpetually pessimistic are relegated to semantics — “Well, define victory!” they’d matter-of-factly state.

Okay, here’s victory:

BAGHDAD — Anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr — long a thorn in the side of the U.S. military and Iraqi government — intends to disarm his once-feared Mahdi Army militia and remake it as a social-services organization.

The transformation would represent a significant turnabout for a group that, as recently as earlier this year, was seen as one of the most destabilizing anti-American forces in Iraq. For much of the past several years, the Mahdi Army, headed by Mr. Sadr, a Shiite cleric, controlled sizable chunks of Baghdad and other major cities. Its brand of pro-Shiite activism had the side effect of pitting Iraqis against each other, helping to stir worries of civil war.

Recently, however, the group has been hit by a largely successful Iraqi military crackdown against militia members who have been operating as criminal gangs. At the same time, Mr. Sadr’s popular support is dwindling: Residents who once viewed the Mahdi Army as champions of the poor have become alienated by what they see as its thuggish behavior.

And why is that? Because Bush found his general — David Petraeus, the guy who wrote the US military’s counterinsurgency Bible. The Surge wasn’t a new strategy (the strategy was reinventing Iraqi government in as close to a Western image as possible), but a tactic (simultaneously cleaning out insurgents while winning the locals and training the Iraqi security forces in our military’s image; that is, making them a professional fighting force.)

Sure there’s still a ways to go. But all those things the pessimists promised would happen? They never happened. And all those things the pessimists said would never happen? They are happening. Right now.