Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Progress report in Iraq

Washington Post:

President Bush today claimed progress in the war in Iraq, citing the killing Sunday of a top insurgent leader in Baghdad and growing capabilities of Iraqi troops. But he repeated a warning that upcoming votes in Iraq may be accompanied by a surge of violence.

Speaking in the White House Rose Garden after a briefing from two top military commanders, Bush said, "The support of Congress for our troops and our mission is important, and Americans need to know about the gains we've made in recent weeks and months. They need to know the way we're [adapting] our tactics and the way we're changing our strategy to meet the needs on the ground."

Bush urged Congress to listen carefully to the two Army generals -- Gen. John P. Abizaid, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, and Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top U.S. commander in Iraq -- who jointly briefed him this morning on the war.

He said they updated him on a raid in Baghdad in which U.S. and Iraqi forces "tracked down and killed Abu Azzam, the second most-wanted al Qaeda leader in Iraq." Bush was referring to Abdallah Najim Abdallah Muhammad Juwari, an Iraqi also known as Abu Azzam. He has been identified by the U.S. military as the "emir of Baghdad" for the insurgent group, al Qaeda in Iraq, which is headed by Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab Zarqawi.

...

Al Qaeda in Iraq denied yesterday that Abu Azzam was Zarqawi's deputy, calling him merely a "soldier" for the group and the leader of an active brigade in Baghdad. If he was, in fact, killed, the group said in a statement posted on the Internet, "we congratulate him for being a martyr."

...

Bush said that in addition to "hunting down high-valued targets like Azzam and Zarqawi," U.S. forces are "coordinating aggressive counterterrorism operations" and training more Iraqi forces.

"The growing size and increasing capability of the Iraqi security forces are helping our coalition address the challenge we have faced since the beginning of the war," Bush said. "By leaving Iraqi units in the cities we've cleared out, we can keep the cities safe while we move on to hunt down the terrorists in other parts of the country."

This points to something I have said in the past concerning how the US intended to deal with its force to space problem in Iraq. Training enough Iraqis to take over cities that have been cleared stops the revolving door of terrorism coming back after they have been cleared. This has been their long term strategy for some time and it is not clear why they have not articulated it before.