Redstate

Posted at 2:58pm on Jul. 8, 2008 Thank You for Supporting Our Troops

By Congressman Mike Conaway

Thank you so much to the more than 4,800 of you who responded to the petition drive I started in support of General Petraeus and our troops' effort in Iraq. With your help, we were able to present this American hero with solid, heartfelt evidence of support for him, his troops, and their mission.

General Petraeus genuinely appreciated the gesture, and wrote the following letter of thanks for your heartfelt support:

Read on...

Posted in Congress | General Petraeus | Iraq | Petition | Victory — Comments (3) / Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 5:25pm on Apr. 11, 2008 How Do You Spell Defeat?

Ask House Democrats

By absentee

The appearances before Congress by General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker this week were marked less by the sober forthrightness of the two men than by Democrat grandstanding. Tuesday’s Senate hearings were best summed up by Sen. Joseph Lieberman: "As I hear the questions and the statements today, it seems to me that there's a kind of 'hear no progress in Iraq, see no progress in Iraq, and most of all, speak of no progress in Iraq.'"

On Wednesday the hearings were before the House Armed Services Committee. Rep. Ike Skelton (D-MO) set the Democrat tone in his opening remarks. "We should not begin this hearing without recalling how we got here," he said. "Iraq was invaded on incorrect information. The turbulent aftermath following the initial military victory was not considered, despite warnings of the aftermath, including two such warnings from me. Now we're in our sixth year of attempting to quell this horrendous aftermath." The remainder of his opening speech was heavy on the horrendous, as he invoked failures and Bin Laden to paint a bleak picture of an impotent America, an intransigent Iraq, a neglected Afghanistan, and a stubborn President.

"Things haven't changed that much in Iraq," was the ever-present message. House Democrats piled on a theme of "No Hope, No Change" in contrast to their leading Democrat candidate, who for his part on Tuesday was keen on pointing out that there is “still violence in Iraq.”

Posted in Congress | Defeatocrats | Democrats | General Petraeus | War — Comments (26)/ Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 1:15am on Mar. 15, 2008 Iraqi Political Reconciliation: The Petraeus Take

By Pejman Yousefzadeh

Personally, I am happy to have General Petraeus put pressure on the Iraqis to work to achieve greater political reconciliation and to preserve the advances made under the surge. So I welcome his comments and his "stern" warnings to the Iraqis. At the same time, I am sure he knows just how hard it is for the Iraqis, after decades of Ba'athist tyranny, to create a functioning democracy and so when he makes his statements on the issue of political reconcilation, I know that they are backed up by a healthy sense of perspective.

This differs, of course, from all of those who simply want to declare the surge a failure, say that political reconciliation is impossible and engage in a precipitous withdrawal that will undermine our long term security interests. General Petraeus and those of like mind issue critiques in good faith and with the hope of achieving real success on the political reconciliation front while at the same time pursuing what has been an exceedingly successful counterinsurgency strategy. Others simply want to go home and do not appear to care much what happens when Iraq descends into complete chaos in the aftermath of a precipitous withdrawal.

Posted in General Petraeus | Iraq | National Security | Political Reconciliation | The Surge — Comments (3)/ Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 2:58pm on Jan. 2, 2008 ...and they appear to be in the process of taking the torch and running with it

Or, "Being there at the beginning of a bona-fide phenomenon? Priceless."

By Jeff Emanuel

The ellipses at the beginning of this post's title are intended as a continuation of the subtitle of this excellent post from earlier today. Well done as always, Charles.

[Note: Photographs from the meeting mentioned below are available here.]

During the year that General Petraeus and his counterinsurgency force have been on the ground in Iraq, the Concerned Local Citizens program, until recently a tiny, localized “neighborhood watch” equivalent, has grown into a nationwide phenomenon.

Called “basically a thumb in the eye at a Maliki government that won’t get its [act] together” by one American officer whose unit I spent time with in August, the Concerned Local Citizens program puts ground-level security in the hands of the individual tribes and groups who need it most. Under the program’s coalition-crafted guidelines, members of individual tribes are allowed to arm themselves and to conduct their own security operations and patrols, provided that, among other requirements, they submit to the authority of Coalition and Iraqi Security forces.

Read on.

Posted in concerned citizens | foreign policy | General Petraeus | Iraq | War — Comments (9)/ Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 5:44pm on Nov. 3, 2007 "The Petraeus Curve"

By Pejman Yousefzadeh

Don't look now, but things have improved significantly in Iraq. And the following passage is highly significant:

The current achievements, and they are achievements, are being treated as almost an embarrassment in certain quarters. The entire context of the contest for the Democratic nomination for president has been based on the conclusion that Iraq is an absolute disaster and the first task of the next president is to extricate the United States at maximum speed. Democrats who voted for the war have either repudiated their past support completely (John Edwards) or engaged in a convoluted partial retraction (Hillary Clinton). Congressional Democrats have spent most of this year trying (and failing) to impose a timetable for an outright exit. In Britain, in a somewhat more subtle fashion admittedly, Gordon Brown assumed on becoming the Prime Minister that he should send signals to the voters that Iraq had been "Blair's War", not one to which he or Britain were totally committed.

I don't for a moment think that we have run out of challenges to overcome in Iraq. But it is sheer folly not to admit that since the implementation of the surge and General Petraeus's counterinsurgency strategy, there have been significant improvements in the quality of life in the country. And I wonder--as the article does--why it is that more people don't celebrate those improvements.

Those people will have to be the ones who give the answer to that question. But for my part, I can only surmise that sometimes, the pain of being wrong can be so overwhelming that certain people can't bring themselves to celebrate what is so obviously celebratory. And given all of the comments that the surge was failing (many of which were delivered well before the surge was fully implemented), there may well be a lot of people who are gradually realizing that they were wrong about the surge and about the future of Iraq in general.

Posted in General Petraeus | Iraq | The Surge | War — Comments (11)/ Email this page » / Read More »