A War We Just Might Win

The New York Times published an op-ed piece this morning by Michael E. O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and Kenneth M. Pollack is the director of research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings.

The Brookings Institution sells itself as

"an extraordinary group of independent scholars who are thinking, researching, writing, and speaking about the major challenges and opportunities facing the United States and the world."

In a surprising move the op-ed in the Times has several revelations about the status of things in Iraq. At least they will be surprising if you only get your information about what is happening in Iraq from the antique media.

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.

After the furnace-like heat, the first thing you notice when you land in Baghdad is the morale of our troops. In previous trips to Iraq we often found American troops angry and frustrated — many sensed they had the wrong strategy, were using the wrong tactics and were risking their lives in pursuit of an approach that could not work.

Today, morale is high. The soldiers and marines told us they feel that they now have a superb commander in Gen. David Petraeus; they are confident in his strategy, they see real results, and they feel now they have the numbers needed to make a real difference.

How much longer should American troops keep fighting and dying to build a new Iraq while Iraqi leaders fail to do their part? And how much longer can we wear down our forces in this mission? These haunting questions underscore the reality that the surge cannot go on forever. But there is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008.