"Tell Me How This Ends"
A couple noteworthy items:
National Security correspondent David Martin puts the war in a military context:
Coming up on the 4th anniversary of the war in Iraq, it no longer seems worth the effort to argue about who made what mistakes. The relevant question now is the one General David Petraeus asked in the opening days of the invasion – "tell me how this ends."Meantime, his frequent collaborator, producer Mary Walsh remembers the early days of covering the war:It is one of history's minor ironies that as the new commander in Iraq, Petraeus is now in charge of answering his own question. He is pursuing a classic counterinsurgency strategy – a surge of troops to protect the citizens of Baghdfad from violence and buy time for the Iraqi government to get its act together. But as both U.S. intelligence and the Pentagon now acknowledge, this is not a classic insurgency.
Just after the city fell David Martin and I toured Baghdad neighborhoods with Col. Ted Spain, who was basically the chief of police at the time. He had 900 American MPs for a city of 5.5 million. Was that enough? "I would like to have more, Spain said. "I would always like to have more."There's more, much more, both sobering and insightful. This is a good time to think of where we've been. And wonder about where we may be headed.As I look to the future in Iraq, I can't help looking back. I think of Col. Spain that day in May 2003 surrounded by young Iraqi men. "We hate you Americans," they bluntly told him. They also told him they had no work and if he could help get them jobs the sting of defeat would not be so bad.