That's consistent with a recent influential NY Times op-ed by Pollack and O'hanlon suggesting the tide was turning.
Only problem is that it's about 4 years too late and isn't accompanied by political cooperation.
Pollack: ‘Surge’ Producing Real Progress in Iraq
Kenneth M. Pollack, a leading expert on Iraq, supplied intellectual arguments for the 2003 invasion of Iraq but then turned quite critical of the war. He now says after his latest trip to Iraq that though conditions remain difficult, there were significant improvements on the ground as a result of the U.S. “surge” policy. “We came away feeling that Iraq was absolutely a mess, the situation remained grave, but that we did have the right strategy, and that if any strategy could create stability in Iraq, it was the counterinsurgency and stability strategy that General David Petraeus had brought with him,” Pollack said.
You and your colleague, Michael E. O’Hanlon, wrote an op-ed for The New York Times on your recent trip to Iraq whose headline says: “A War We Just Might Win.” That sounds very optimistic. Can you elaborate?
We weren’t quite comfortable with the word “win” when we talked about using it in the piece, but nevertheless we came away from this trip feeling that there was more progress than we expected, especially in regard to creating security in some important parts of Iraq, and to a lesser extent in terms of local, political, and economic developments. That said, to us there were enough signs of life in the “surge” that it was worth allowing it to continue for some additional months to see if it could continue to make progress. We didn’t come away having decided the war in Iraq was won, everything was fine, and it was just a matter of time before we could put up a real banner that said “Mission Accomplished.” Quite the contrary, we came away feeling that Iraq was absolutely a mess, the situation remained grave, but that we did have the right strategy, and that if any strategy could create stability in Iraq, it was the counterinsurgency and stability strategy that General David Petraeus had brought with him.
Let’s talk about some of the signs of real progress. Where would you start?
Starting with American forces, the first thing that was striking to me since my last trip to Iraq was the change in morale. In my previous trips to Iraq, I typically found American military personnel angry, frustrated, and confused, not really understanding their mission.
This time around, I was really struck by how positive a great many military personnel seemed. Now, this was not 100 percent. There are still some very frustrated people, and I’m sure there are many others who we didn’t get to meet. But the overall change in tone I felt was important. They seemed to believe they actually had a good strategy. They trusted General Petraeus; they felt the change in strategy and the change in tactics was actually accomplishing something. They could all point to tangible progress in their own particular corner of Iraq. A lot of that is attributable to this change in strategy, the emphasis on counterinsurgency, securing the Iraqi people, and helping them to rebuild their lives. Power, water, sanitation, all the things that I and other people have been talking about for years—these are now the principal mission of American military and civilian personnel in Iraq, and it does seem to be paying off, at least at the local level in certain important areas of Iraq.
Do you find the electric power is on more continuously?
We found there had been a real shift from trying to repair and defend the national power grid, which was extremely difficult to do. There now is a shift away from that toward helping the Iraqis essentially get their own local generators and bring local businesses and houses into those local generators.
There’s been a lot written by the journalists in Iraq in the last couple of months about Anbar province and how the Sunni tribal leaders have coalesced against al-Qaeda in Iraq. You saw this firsthand?
We did. I’ll be honest with you. I didn’t really have a full sense of just how far it had gone or how much of an impact it has had. As always in war, it’s important to be lucky, and this was one where it was mostly more about being lucky than being good--although the U.S. forces and General Petraeus did the right thing and took advantage of their good luck very quickly.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq and other Salafi jihadist groups set themselves up as the new local government in very big swathes of territory across the country and started imposing their brand of Sharia law that the Iraqi Sunnis didn’t care for it. AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq] started doing things such as kidnapping sons of local sheikhs and holding them for ransom, kidnapping daughters and giving them away to their loyalists as wives, and killing local sheikhs or other leaders who weren’t participating and cooperating with them as much as they wanted. None of this sat well with the Sunni Arabs. They basically decided among themselves that they were done with al-Qaeda and the other Salafi groups. They wanted to get rid of them, and they came to the U.S. forces.
