Marines Quietly Begin Leaving Bases in Iraqi Cities
On July 16th I wrote short post wondering if Iraq could be the Democrats Waterloo… For better or worse I think most Americans are more interested in the economy than they are Iraq now but the fact that Marines are quietly withdrawing from Fallujah is indeed good news.
From Fox News:
Last One Turn Out the Lights: Marines Quietly Begin Leaving Bases in Iraqi Cities
Friday, October 17, 2008
By Jennifer Griffin
WASHINGTON — When Marine Maj. Gen. John Kelly deployed to Iraq in February, the violence had fallen so low in Anbar province that he began figuring out how to start closing bases and prepare to go home.
In the last 10 months the Marines in Fallujah have done what was unthinkable before the surge began — they have quietly transferred out of one of Anbar province’s largest cities. FOX News has learned in an exclusive interview with Kelly from Fallujah that 80 percent of the move is complete. In February there were 8,000 Marines living at Fallujah base. Now there are about 3,000 left. By Nov. 14 there will be none.
“We will shut down the command function here and I will move; my staff has already started to move,” Kelly, the commander of Multinational Force-West, told FOX News in an exclusive interview via satellite. “We will turn the lights off here.”
They will hand the Fallujah base over to their Iraqi counterparts on Nov. 14, having relocated themselves and thousands of combat vehicles to the desert base of Al Asad to the west. Marines will no longer be seen in city centers such as Fallujah — a major step toward leaving Iraq, and one step closer to Iraq’s goal of having U.S. troops out of its population centers by mid-2009 — one of the key points enshrined in the Status of Forces Agreement being reviewed on Capitol Hill today.
I’m still not ready to join Micheal Yon in saying the war is over but we have turned the corner and are on the path to victory.
The Surge & Sarah…
I was planning on taking a weekend hiatus from blogging for various reasons but I thought I’d take a short hiatus from my hiatus to point out a couple must reads.
The first is Matthew Kaminski’s interview with retired general Jack Kean In the Wall Street Journal. Gen. Kean who was one of the officers who helped formulate the surge strategy explains that it wasn’t simply more troops that made the difference… It was the change in mission.
Three months into the war, Gen. Keane visited Iraq as the Army’s deputy chief of staff. “I felt we had a low-level insurgency on our hands and I had a long plane ride home as a result of it, because I thought my Army was ill-prepared to fight that kind of war and it would take time for us to figure it out.” His was a lonely view at the time. Gen. Keane passed on a promotion to Army chief for personal reasons but kept up with Iraq.
For the next three years, Donald Rumsfeld and the senior generals pushed a “short-war” scenario, “which was to get a political solution quickly, transition to the Iraqis security quickly, and get out,” says Gen. Keane. “It didn’t work. And why didn’t it work? Because the enemy voted and they took advantage. The fact that we did not adjust to what the enemy was doing to us and the Iraqis were not capable of standing by themselves — that was our major failure. . . . It took us all a while to understand the war and [that] we had the wrong strategy to fight it. Where I parted from those leaders [at the Pentagon] is when we knew the facts — and the facts were pretty evident in 2005 and compelling in 2006 — and those facts were simply that we could not protect the population and the levels of violence were just out of control.”
In late 2006, after the midterm election debacle for Republicans, pressure rose for a quick if dishonorable exit from Iraq. Gen. Keane met Frederick Kagan, who was putting together a report on an alternative strategy for Iraq at the American Enterprise Institute. On Dec. 11, both men found themselves at the White House to push the plan. Congress, the Joint Chiefs, Iraq commander Gen. George Casey and the Iraq Study Group all wanted a fast drawdown. President Bush ignored their advice. Gen. Petraeus was sent out in February to oversee the new, risky and politically unpopular surge.
Even Gen. Keane didn’t expect the new strategy to work so fast. “It’s a stunning turnaround, and I think people will study it for years because it’s unparalleled in counterinsurgency practice,” he says. “All the gains we’ve achieved against al Qaeda, the Sunni insurgency, the Iranians in the south are sustainable” — a slight pause here — “if we’re smart about it and not let them regroup and get back into it.”
The second is Ralph Peters’ excellent commentary about the elitist sneers directed at Sarah Palin by the media and other liberals in today’s New York Post.
I KNOW Sarah Palin, and so does my wife.
Neither of us ever actually met the governor of Alaska, but we grew up with her - in the small-town America despised by the leftwing elite.
One gal-pal classmate of my wife’s has even traveled from New York’s Finger Lakes to Alaska to hunt moose with her husband. (Got one, too.) And no, Ms. Streisand, she isn’t a redneck missing half her teeth - she’s a lawyer.
The sneering elites and their mediacrat fellow travelers just don’t get it: How on earth could anyone vote for someone who didn’t attend an Ivy League school? And having more than 1.7 children marks any woman as a rube. (If Palin had any taste, her teenage daughter would’ve had a quiet abortion in a discreet facility.)
And what kind of retro-Barbie would stay happily married to her high-school sweetheart? Ugh. She even kills animals and eats them. (The meat and fish served in the upscale bistros patronized by Obama supporters appears by magic - it didn’t really come from living things. . .)
We all know someone like Sarah and we all know families like hers… They are the heart an soul of this country, every time the media and liberal elites sneer and call her a “hick” they’re sneering at us. The truth is the smart one’s do it out of fear… They’re worried and rightly so, they’re smart enough to realize she has energized grassroots conservatives like never before. The dumb do it out arrogance, they just don’t “get” her or us.
Obama Tried To Stall Iraq Withdrawal??? Updated
Update (Friday, September 19, 2008): Jake Tapper of ABC News is reporting that Bush Administration officials support Barack Obama’s version of events… Details below the fold…
If this is true somebody’s got some splainin to do:
OBAMA TRIED TO STALL GIS’ IRAQ WITHDRAWAL
By AMIR TAHER, New York Post, September 15, 2008
WHILE campaigning in public for a speedy withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, Sen. Barack Obama has tried in private to persuade Iraqi leaders to delay an agreement on a draw-down of the American military presence.
According to Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, Obama made his demand for delay a key theme of his discussions with Iraqi leaders in Baghdad in July.
“He asked why we were not prepared to delay an agreement until after the US elections and the formation of a new administration in Washington,” Zebari said in an interview.
Obama insisted that Congress should be involved in negotiations on the status of US troops - and that it was in the interests of both sides not to have an agreement negotiated by the Bush administration in its “state of weakness and political confusion.”
“However, as an Iraqi, I prefer to have a security agreement that regulates the activities of foreign troops, rather than keeping the matter open.” Zebari says.
Though Obama claims the US presence is “illegal,” he suddenly remembered that Americans troops were in Iraq within the legal framework of a UN mandate. His advice was that, rather than reach an accord with the “weakened Bush administration,” Iraq should seek an extension of the UN mandate.
While in Iraq, Obama also tried to persuade the US commanders, including Gen. David Petraeus, to suggest a “realistic withdrawal date.” They declined. Read the rest…
Hat tip: Dan Spencer @ RedState.
Could Iraq Be The Democrats Waterloo?
Democrats have spent virtually every waking minute of the last 5 years predicting disaster in Iraq. They’ve so thoroughly invested themselves in defeat one has to wonder what they’re going to do now that the situation there has improved so dramatically that even the mainstream media has taken notice?
For the moment they seem to be in denial and clinging to the same defeatist mantra they’ve used since 2003. They seem to have completely missed the surge, the Anbar awakening, the collapse of militia groups and the growing strength of the Iraqi government. They keeping focusing on the increasingly rare suicide bombers, coalition casualties, and the difficulties the Iraqi government is having accomplishing a few legislative benchmarks.
I’m not ready to join Michael Yon and say the war has ended but I think we’re finally on the right track.
Take a couple of minutes to read The New Reality in Iraq By Frederick W. Kagan, Kimberly Kagan & Jack Keane in today’s Wall Street Journal and then checkout While America Slept (Part One) at the Mudville Gazette.
I think it’s safe to say we’ve turned the corner in Iraq and it’s time for Democrats to face the reality that not only can we win in Iraq but that victory is close at hand.