YEAH, BUT THERE'S NO YELLOWCAKE...:

The Dissenter Who Changed the War: As the No. 2 Commander in Iraq, Raymond Odierno Challenged the Military Establishment, Pressing for More Troops and a Long-Term Strategy to Guide Them (Thomas E. Ricks, 2/08/09, The Washington Post)

Army Gen. Raymond T. Odierno was an unlikely dissident, with little in his past to suggest that he would buck his superiors and push the U.S. military in radically new directions.

A 1976 West Point graduate and veteran of the Persian Gulf War and the Kosovo campaign, Odierno had earned a reputation as the best of the Army's conventional thinkers -- intelligent and ambitious, but focused on using the tools in front of him rather than discovering new and unexpected ones. That image was only reinforced during his first tour in Iraq after the U.S. invasion in 2003.

As commander of the 4th Infantry Division in the Sunni Triangle, Odierno led troops known for their sometimes heavy-handed tactics, kicking in doors and rounding up thousands of Iraqi "MAMs" (military-age males). He finished his tour believing the fight was going well. "I thought we had beaten this thing," he would later recall.

Sent back to Iraq in 2006 as second in command of U.S. forces, under orders to begin the withdrawal of American troops and shift fighting responsibilities to the Iraqis, Odierno found a situation that he recalled as "fairly desperate, frankly."

So that fall, he became the lone senior officer in the active-duty military to advocate a buildup of American troops in Iraq, a strategy rejected by the full chain of command above him, including Gen. George W. Casey Jr., then the top commander in Iraq and Odierno's immediate superior.

Communicating almost daily by phone with retired Gen. Jack Keane, an influential former Army vice chief of staff and his most important ally in Washington, Odierno launched a guerrilla campaign for a change in direction in Iraq, conducting his own strategic review and bypassing his superiors to talk through Keane to White House staff members and key figures in the military. It would prove one of the most audacious moves of the Iraq war, and one that eventually reversed almost every tenet of U.S. strategy.

Just over two years ago, President George W. Bush announced that he was ordering a "surge" of U.S. forces. But that was only part of what amounted to a major change in the mission of American troops, in which many of the traditional methods employed by Odierno and other U.S. commanders in the early years of the war were discarded in favor of tactics based on the very different doctrine of counterinsurgency warfare.

Now, President Obama, an opponent of the war and later the surge, must deal with the consequences of the surge's success -- an Iraq that looks to be on the mend, with U.S. casualties so reduced that commanders talk about keeping tens of thousands of soldiers there for many years to come.

I was wrong on the surge in Iraq (Tom Switzer, February 09, 2009, The Australian)

[I]t looks as if the US is achieving some kind of success in Iraq. That is quite a mouthful from someone who strongly opposed the war from the outset.

But these are the facts: Coalition military and Iraqi civilian casualties are down significantly. The level of violence is the lowest in six years. Iraq's economic growth levels are today nearly one-third higher than under Saddam Hussein. The Sadrist militia and other Shia militant groups have been halted. The Sunni Arabs who once formed the heart of the Iraqi insurgency are among the most steadfast coalition allies in the battle against al-Qa'ida. The sectarian civil war has ended.

Local politics, meanwhile, is embracing the complicated but exhilarating quality of a functioning democracy. At the weekend, Iraqis voted in largely violence-free elections for local representatives, many of whom were secular candidates, in a turnout that varied from about 40 per cent in two provinces of Baghdad to 75 per cent in some Kurdish areas in the north. More than 14,000 candidates competed for 440 seats in 14 of Iraq's 18 provinces.

All of this amounts to remarkable progress for a nation that only six years ago was ruled by one of the world's most bloodthirsty tyrants.

Iraq's Good Example (Jim Hoagland, February 8, 2009, Washington Post)

The provincial elections held a week ago were far from perfect, and personal relationships among the country's Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds still range from malignant to murderous. In Anbar province, disgruntled Sunni sheiks didn't ask for recounts or fire their political consultants. They unleashed threats of new mayhem unless they were immediately declared the winners. Old habits die hard in Iraq, too.

But by the standards of the past -- and of the rough neighborhood in which Iraqis still live -- the two general elections that Iraq has held in four years stand as paragons of progress and adaptation that others in the region should aim to emulate. That development should not be ignored or minimized, particularly as the United States and Europe wrestle with analogous problems that confront a newly besieged Afghanistan. Even more important than shifting troops from Iraq to Afghanistan may be shifting counterinsurgency lessons learned.

Another signpost suggests that Iraq is closer today to being a source of regional stability than it ever was in its pre-American era, when Saddam Hussein repeatedly threatened (and at times tried) to annihilate Iraq's Arab and Iranian neighbors as well as Israel. That signpost is the growing acceptance by the region's Sunni Arab regimes of the central Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whose Shiite-based State of Law coalition scored the biggest victories in the election results released Thursday.

Just a few years ago, Jordan's leaders were ominously warning that they would not accept Iraq's becoming part of a "Shiite crescent" of subversion. Today, Amman leads the way in establishing improved diplomatic relations, economic cooperation and security ties with Baghdad. Abu Dhabi and other Gulf states, as well as Egypt, have also upgraded their relations with Iraq, as Maliki and his aides have established some distance from both the United States and Iran.

"President Bush made many mistakes in occupying Iraq," one Arab official told me recently. "But he did the right thing in staying with the surge and giving the Iraqi government time to show it could sustain itself. The results of the past 18 months have persuaded many of us that Iraq's civilian government is here to stay, and it is time to cooperate" with Baghdad, rather than push for a return to domination of Iraq by the Sunni Arab minority.

The at this point unquestioned success of the regime change leaves opponents of the war nakedly in the position of defending Saddam.

Related articles by Zemanta

• How Technology Won Sadr City Battle (cbsnews.com)

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 8, 2009 10:30 AM