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"Our strategy is built on the premise that progress on security will pave the way for political progress," Bush said in his weekly radio address. "This report shows that conditions can change, progress can be made, and the fight in Iraq can be won."
So, then, why are we focusing on one of the smallest sources of instability in Iraq, Al-Qaeda? People in Iraq aren't lying awake worrying about Al-Qaeda. Instead, they are concerned about who will burst into their home and make them the latest of the 650 a month to be tortured and killed. The sectarian forces who carry out these killings are doing so because of the political instability, not because of Al-Qaeda. It's a civil war, not an Al-Qaeda manhunt.
Remember, in the elections that Bush keeps bragging about the Sunni minority boycotted the vote. They felt they wouldn't get a fair shake from a Shia government, so they launched their own death squads. The Shia retaliated. Sure, Al-Qaeda stirred the pot with the Samarra bombing, but this sectarian killing was well underway by then.
In contrast, the report showed a complete political paralysis, with the surge treating one of the symptoms (Al-Qaeda) without showing any progress on the cause.
At a news conference Friday, the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Peter Pace, said the number of battle-ready Iraqi battalions able to fight independently has dropped from 10 to six in recent months despite an increase in U.S. training efforts. Pace said the readiness of the Iraqi fighting units was not an issue to be "overly concerned" about because the problem was partly attributable to losses in the field.
So the shining glory of the past two years has been to get six battalions "able to fight independently"? And a few of those battalions have already been wiped out? And this is with "increased" training efforts? I guess "progress" is another one of those words that Bush gets to re-define as "whatever the situation looks like".
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