Left Flank

I don't post about the Iraq War much, but it's still on my mind. Outgoing General David Petraeus caught my attention with these un-Bush-like comments.

This is not the sort of struggle where you take a hill, plant the flag and go home to a victory parade... it's not war with a simple slogan

Juan Cole evaluates Petraeus.

Petraeus has great virtues as a commander, the chief of which in my view is that he genuinely cares about people. He really, really wanted to stop shoppers in bazaars from being blown to bits, and by God if he didn't in fact cut down on that sort of thing. He is too smart to think the 'surge' did it all, and knows that the situation is still fragile. Another of his virtues is that he understands the need to deal with people where they are. He did not try to ignore or crush the Sunnis and the Sadrists. He dealt with them. A lot of supporters of the Da`wa Party and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, both fundamentalist Shiite parties, are annoyed with him for striking those deals, because they are convinced that they can crush their enemies. And as long as the new Iraqi government has that attitude, the peace is fragile indeed.

Of course, he's a general so you also have to expect him to act like one, i.e to kill the enemy. We won't know for some time all the on-the-ground policies he deployed, and of course Bob Woodward intimated that he presided over a Phoenix Project-like dirty war of assassination of Sunni insurgents. My own guess is that even if such a tactic was pursued, it was the politicking that made the real difference.

The comments section is also very interesting.

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