Petraeus--"We can't just walk away"
...There is more. The interview confirms my thoughts on the September reporting period. More troubling for the Democrats is the intelligence confirms what they do not want to hear. Iraq is the central front for al Qaeda. Running away from the central front of the war is certainly no way to win it.
“Our assessment is that this is the central front for al-Qaeda. They have a global war of terror, and Iraq is the central front. Whether you like it or not. That is something that the leaders of the intelligence community in the West and our joint special operations commander agree on. It is certainly one very important consideration in looking at Iraq,” he told The Times.
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But he dented Democrats’ hopes that his crucial report to Washington in September would help to make their case for the withdrawal of US troops. September was “a deadline for a report, not a deadline for a change in policy”, he said.
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“There are operations going on all around Baghdad (in the south, west, north and east). This is part of an offensive around what we call the Baghdad belt. This is using the five brigades and a combat aviation brigade and Marine Expeditionary Unit. This is a combined effort,” he said.
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“You are never going to eliminate sensational attacks in Baghdad. That cannot be your measure of success. What we have to do is reduce their number and their impact. We had done quite well until the attack yesterday that killed a number of innocent civilians,” said General Petraeus. (Emphasis added.)
...The Democrats, with an eye on the presidential race, are expected to use the occasion to redouble the call for US forces to be brought home. “Ambassador Crocker and I intend to go back and provide a snapshot at that time . . . and begin to describe what has been achieved and what has not been achieved and provide some sense of implications of courses of action. Neither of us is under any illusion.”
At the very least the Princeton-edu-cated paratrooper hopes to “put time back on the Washington clock”. He has always maintained that there are two clocks on Iraq. One ticks slowly away in the hot, grubby streets of Baghdad, where progress is small and painful, while the other ticks furiously on the Potomac, where patience is fast running out for a war that has claimed more than 3,528 American lives and billions of wasted dollars.
Al-Qaeda is keenly aware of the Washington clock,” he said. “They are obviously going to have a surge of their own. You saw an example of this yesterday. They wanted to make sure that the headlines about the launch of the offensive don’t create too much hope.”...
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The highlighted text above confirms my earlier post on what should and should not be a metric for success in this war. Violence against non combatants is a measure of the enemy's depravity and willingness to commit war crimes. It is not a measure of his military capacity or ability to win the war. A transcript of the interview is here.
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