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Badgers Forward:

Last fall there was virtually no government here and the report that was ballyhooed as an admission of failure, had every reason to be perceived as accurate.

And then things changed.

Read the rest.

UPDATE: And, commenting on a dire New York Times' assessment of the Surge in Baghdad, Bill Roggio offers up a recent history lesson:

The leaked memo on the status of the Baghdad Security Plan is reminiscent of the report on the status of Anbar province that was leaked to the Washington Post in the fall of 2006. "The U.S. military is no longer able to defeat a bloody insurgency in western Iraq or counter al-Qaeda's rising popularity there, according to newly disclosed details from a classified Marine Corps intelligence report that set off debate in recent months about the military's mission in Anbar province," the Washington Post reported. In other words, Anbar province was hopelessly lost.

Anbar province was hotly contested at the time. Al Qaeda was on the rise and a political solution seemed beyond reach. But the Post failed to note the rise of the Anbar Salvation Council. Last November, I warned that it was too soon to judge the situation in Anbar. Six months later, the security situation in huge swaths of Anbar province, including Ramadi, once the most violent city in Iraq, had seen a dramatic turnaround. And now the Anbar counterinsurgency is cited as a model success story.

In an interview last week, LTG Odierno explained why it's difficult to judge progress in the midst of a complex counterinsurgency operation. "Now, I explain to my commanders and my soldiers when I talk to them, it's kind of like a teeter-totter; you work your way up the teeter-totter, and when you go past the tipping point, it happens very quickly, and we've seen that out in Anbar. We're still going up that teeter-totter, and I'm not sure how long it's going to take us to get to that tipping point or if I believe or assess that we can't get to that tipping point."

Read the conclusion.

Posted by Bill at June 6, 2007 10:16 AM | TrackBack (0)