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.
