Is Victory Almost At Hand in Iraq?
By James Gordon Meek
President Obama’s new intel guru, retired Navy Adm. Dennis Blair, dropped what I considered kind of a bombshell on Thursday which was all but ignored in a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing looking at global threats to the U.S. You'll have a hard time finding it in news coverage, too, though we reported it in today's New York Daily News.
Buried 19 pages deep in Blair's 49-page statement - and not even worthy of his office's press release - Blair said that Iraq’s Sunni insurgency has all but quit the fight after six years of war against the U.S.-led coalition:
“Most Iraqi-led Sunni insurgent groups have largely suspended operations against the Coalition, favoring engagement with the United States to protect their communities, to oppose AQI, or protect against feared domination by the Iraqi Government, although many are hedging by maintaining their organizational structures and access to weapons.”
Blair also noted that operations targeting the foreign-led Al Qaeda in Iraq...
“[H]ave reduced AQI’s operational capabilities and restricted the group’s freedom of movement and sanctuaries. Nevertheless, we judge the group is likely to retain a residual capacity to undertake terrorist operations for years to come.”
I certainly don’t want to leap to any conclusions here or get too far ahead of events, but…doesn’t that essentially mean WE HAVE WON?
Next question: Why did it take so long to figure out how to do it?
