After talks at a base in the Kuwaiti desert with his military commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, and the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, Bush said security gains in Iraq "are allowing some U.S. forces to return home."
He added: "Any additional reduction will be based on the recommendation of General Petraeus, and those recommendations will be based entirely on the conditions on the ground in Iraq."
Then he said something true but misleading:
Bush conceded that until last year, "our strategy simply wasn't working," with Iraq riven by sectarian violence and al Qaeda militants strengthening their grip in many areas. He said the new strategy, involving a troop buildup and a focus on counter-insurgency warfare, was turning things around.
Our strategy wasn't working for the new phase of the war that started after the February 2006 Samarra Golden Dome bombing and didn't become apparent until summer 2006 as violence in Baghdad began rising. By fall 2006, casualties in Iraq spiked up dramatically and it was after this that the surge idea started to take shape. The surge was a reaction to the failure of our then-existing strategy to cope with the new situation and not a failure of our strategy that had accomplished much up through February 2006.
I think as long as we are winning now, the president just doesn't want to defend past successes in the face of the widespread myth even among war supporters that until the surge we were blowing the war. That is just not true.
Summer 2006 was just another example of what should be obvious: the enemy wants to win, too. War is not a huge exercise in writing the perfect plan that is then unleashed on a passive enemy to proceed nicely through all the stages of the plan in a linear and predictable path to final victory over an enemy that expects to lose. (Although it is frightening how closely that outline reflects our enemy's plans--but for the determination of our President to lead our equally determined troops to victory.)
The surge adapted to the last enemy adaptation. We are now winning the war. The question is does the enemy have the ability to adapt again? This is part of the "al Tet" question about whether the enemy can regain the initiative.
The war is not won. But to be winning now we had to have achieved a number of successes over the prior phases of the war.
Hang tough and we will see final victory even if the enemy finds another way to adapt to our surge and the advances made by the Iraqi government.
