Originally Posted by StormanNorman

The "Surge" in troops to Iraq has little if anything to do with the recent drop in violence. The violence has dropped for mainly three reasons...
1) A change in US tactics by General Patraeus where he dispersed and positioned (permanently) US forces throughout the troubled areas.
2) Iraq has become very segregated; the Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds no longer live in the same neighborhoods; in fact, many of those neighborhoods are now walled off from one another inside Baghdad. And with that has come a drop in sectarian violence...."out of site, out of mind."
3) General Patraeus and US commanders made the bold step of sitting down and negotiating with the Sunni Sheiks and tribal leaders in Al Anbar and Western Iraq.....the very same individuals responsible for the majority or US troop fatalities in Iraq (very un-Bush like to negotiate with "terrorists" when you think about it). Instead of battling the Sunnis, we are now working with them to go after a common enemy....Al Qaeda.

All of these changes in tactics were absolutely necessary and long overdue; General Patraeus and the Bush Administration really had no choice. The violence was spiraling out of control in January 2007 and it had to be thwarted first and foremost.

However, I don't know if I buy Badmutha's simple partisan chants of "victory" and "winning", etc. This thing in Iraq is far more complicated than that....quite a bit more complicated than the simple black and white, victory/defeat cheerleading. Are we going to achieve are primary goals that we had when we invaded Iraq in March 2003, that is, the creation of a strong, unified, very pro-US, democratic Iraq? I have some serious doubts regarding all of these qualifiers. And I can't see any of them coming to fruition...at least, at the current time.