Now, he says things are better, at least as much as they can be with us still there. He says it is time for us to cut them loose and let them handle it themselves. He says they are as trained as we will ever get them to be.

He calls himself "one of the soldiers who takes out the bad guys" (I don't like that but he is good at what he is trained to do.) He hates to admit it and isn't sure it was worth it, but he does think the surge worked enough that we can leave now.

According to a report, made public yesterday, by the Government Accountability Office, "The administration lacks an updated and comprehensive Iraq strategy to move beyond the "surge" of combat troops President Bush launched in January of 2007." It cited "little improvement" where the Iraqi security forces are concerned, noted the failure to implement "key legislation" by the Iraqi parliament, found that crucial ministries had fallen off in spending their budgeted monies, and that "oil and electricity production" continued to miss targets.

Karen DeYoung, June 24, 2008, WaPo (link):

Bush's strategy of January 2007, the GAO said, "defined the original goals and objectives that the Administration believed were achievable by the end of this phase in July 2008." Not meeting many of them changed circumstances on the ground and the pending withdrawal of the last of the additional U.S. forces mean that strategy is now outdated, the report said. The GAO recommends that the State and Defense departments work together to fashion a new approach.

LGen RT Odierno, Mar 13, 2008, Heritage Lecture #1068 (link):

Explaining the reduction in violence and its stra­tegic significance has been the subject of much debate. It's tempting for those of us personally con­nected to the events to exaggerate the effects of the surge. By the same token, it's a gross oversimplifica­tion to say, as some commentators have, that the positive trends we're observing have come about because we paid off the Sunni insurgents or because Muqtada al-Sadr simply decided to announce a ceasefire. These assertions ignore the key variable in the equation--the Coalition's change in strategy and our employment of the surge forces.

Suggesting that the reduction in violence result­ed merely from bribing our enemies to stop fighting us is uninformed and an oversimplification. It over­looks our significant offensive push in the last half of 2007 and our rise in casualties in May and June as we began to take back neighborhoods. It overlooks the salient point that many who reconciled with us did so from a position of weakness, rather than strength. The truth is that the improvement in secu­rity and stability is the result of a number of factors, and what Coalition forces did throughout 2007 ranks among the most significant.

But now that the surge is over--and now that our ground forces are largely depleted--Iran is much stronger, the Taliban is resurgent, and we still haven't reached anything resembling success in Iraq.  This all occurring against the backdrop of a failing state in Afghanistan.  

As Jon Soltz told the American Prospect last week, had those same forces been allocated to Afghanistan--the theater deemed most important by General David Petraeus--then we could have doubled our forces there.

Not surprisingly, America's top military leader, Admiral Mike Mullen agrees:

That's straight from the horse's mouth: We can't send more troops to fight the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan because they're all tied up in Iraq.

So next time someone brings up how "successful" the surge has been in Iraq, just point to the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan.  Note how the disastrously ignorant policies pushed on us by Bush and McCain have done little for Iraq, and only served to benefit the Taliban and, by extension, al Qaeda.