Well there was someone else on that trip: Anthony Cordesman. He's the national security analyist for ABC News. Here's the summary of his report.
While noting a "tenuous case for strategic patience in Iraq," he points out some of the positive trends he found there. However:
These trends are uncertain, and must be considered in the context of a long list of serious political, military, and economic risks that are described in detail. The report also discusses major delays and problems in the original surge strategy. The new US approach to counterinsurgency warfare is making a difference, but it still seems likely from a visit to the scene that the original strategy President Bush announced in January would have failed if it had not been for the Sunni tribal awakening.Greg Sargent over at Talkingpointsmemo had this to say:
And while Pollack and O'Hanlon wrote that the current strategy has the "potential" to produce "a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with," Cordesman says that the current strategy is failing and that our only hope is if the current team in Iraq can come up with "the kind of cohesive plans" that "have been weak or lacking to date." In other words, he says, his trip to Iraq convinced him that the current strategy basically can't get us there -- which is strikingly at odds with what O'Hanlon and Pollack concluded.I wonder if Mike Pintek will be devoting any amount of time (as he did with the O'Hanlon and Pollack op-ed) on Cordesman's report.
Somehow I doubt it.
5 comments:
Now why should Pintek devote any time to a bogus report. You lefties seem to think conservative pundits should give equal time to defeatists reports. The better line would be why doesn't Olbermann devote some time to the sucesses in Iraq. Bear in mind, Pintek is equal time.
That was fast.
So you think that Anthony Cordesman's report is "bogus"?
Why?
Always am curious as to why the left is so ready to accept any report which alludes to failure in Iraq as truth. Publish a report on Iraq that says we can't win and the left views it as Gospel truth. That is the main reason the report is bogus. The left has cried failure on everything and everyone that the cry now goes unheard.
Always am curious as to why the left is so ready to accept any report which alludes to failure in Iraq as truth.
Experience. These reports come from the same people who told us that Saddam had WMD's, that he had a strong relationship with Al Queda and was involved in the 9/11 attacks, that US troops would be greeted as liberators by Iraqis, that "major combat operations in Iraq are over.", etc.
Bring it on, Anon. You're tuned the Wingnut media. Why don't YOU tell us about all the wonderful miracles that the Kleptocrats are performing in Iraq?
Maybe because you already have?
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