Posted by
Always To The Right on Saturday, February 21, 2009 3:01:43 PM
A First Draft of Mythology
In his new book The Gamble, Thomas Ricks gets it mostly wrong on Iraq.
Many leading proponents of the surge have been harshly critical of
Rumsfeld for not implementing this strategy sooner, but General Keane
is not quite as unforgiving. “Look,” he says, “I understand how
difficult this is. It wasn’t until 2006 that I started advocating for a
change in strategy. Before that, a lot of people were troubled by what
we were seeing, but we didn’t have answers.” Inside the administration,
the real obstacle to the surge was the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which
reports directly to the president and which didn’t come around to
supporting the new strategy until well after Rumsfeld had endorsed it.
It remains far from clear that what worked in 2007 could have worked in 2005. As Rumsfeld wrote in a New York Times op-ed
last November, “By early 2007, several years of struggle had created
the new conditions for a tipping point.” Those conditions included a
tectonic shift of the Sunni tribes against al-Qaeda and toward an open
alliance with the Americans, the emergence of a large and increasingly
capable Iraqi security force, the withering losses inflicted on the
insurgency in years of fighting, and the progressive weakening of
Muqtada al-Sadr’s Shiite militia.