|
Hugh Hewett interviews Michael Yon: Surge working
A taste. Go read the whole thing. Hattip Instapundit.HH: Now Michael Yon, a lot of people dont know the significance of Baquba. And so can you explain what peace in Baquba means for the larger war effort? MY: Well, its huge, because al Qaeda had claimed Baquba as their capitol, their worldwide capitol. And you might recall one of the things that kind of upsets people about my reporting is I said Iraq was in a civil war, and I said that way back in February of 2005, and I continue to do so. But when I first wrote that, I was in Baquba, in 2005, and I spent two or three months here. And it was just total you could see it, and you could see al Qaeda was trying to foment that civil war, because thats their underlying strategy, is to do that. And so getting, fracturing al Qaeda here, and al Qaeda alienating so many Iraqis, its helping us to put a damper on the civil war. HH: Now yesterday, Harry Reid said on the floor of the Senate that the surge has failed. Do you think theres any factual basis for making that assertion, Michael Yon, from what youve seen in Iraq over the last many months? MY: Hes wrong, hes wrong. It has absolutely not failed, and in fact, Im finally willing to say it in public. I feel like its starting to succeed. And you know, Im kind of stretching a little bit, because we havent gone too far into it, but I can see it from my travels around, for instance, in Anbar and out here in Diyala Province as well. Baghdads still very problematic. But theres other areas where you can clearly see that there is a positive effect. And the first and foremost thing we have to do is knock down al Qaeda. And with them alienating so many Iraqis, I mean, theyre almost doing it for us. I mean, yeah, it takes military might to finally like wipe them out of Baquba, but its working. I mean, I sense that the surge is working. Reid is just wrong. Posted by: trailing wife 2007-07-13 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=193346 |