Iraq: U.S. Analysts Say 'Surge' Progress Warrants Patience

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Iraq: U.S. Analysts Say 'Surge' Progress Warrants Patience

The analysts aren't painting a rosy picture of military and political progress. And all three say the Iraqi government is moving unacceptably slowly toward political reconciliation.

But Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution and Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies say that the U.S. military surge is so far working well enough that the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki deserves a little more time to make progress on the political front.

"Ken Pollack and I only argue that it's going well enough now that we should keep trying well into 2008 -- but that's not very far away -- and the Congress should not try to use this upcoming period of debate in the early fall to stop the war. Because there's enough going well that we should hope that we can see that momentum spread to other areas, such as Iraqi politics," O'Hanlon says. "And moreover, if we were to give up on the war now, it would lead to -- probably, in our view -- a worse outcome than most Americans are really braced for or ready for, or that the region could easily withstand."

As an example of progress, O'Hanlon and Pollack point to Sunni sheikhs in Anbar province west of Baghdad -- once the most hostile area for U.S. troops -- who now are helping U.S. commanders fight Al-Qaeda and other insurgent forces.

"Mr. Bush might have added, 'Coming out of a couple years of chaos, which was in part due to the fact that his administration did not properly prepare for the post-Saddam [Hussein] period, listened too much to the [former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld doctrine,'" O'Hanlon says. "That makes it even harder, because it's not just the decades of tyranny -- it's the last few years of civil conflict that have really laid emotions raw and may be the single greatest impediment to progress right now of all. So I would take Mr. Bush's interpretation and go one further and remind him of the degree to which his own administration has contributed to the problem."

Ultimately, O'Hanlon and Pollack conclude that those problems are in the past and urge just a few more months to await concrete progress from al-Maliki's government.

"It's working, it's working in a way it never has before," O'Hanlon says. "There's a lot of momentum. It's still a very dangerous country. We have a lot of work to do even on the military front. It's a very difficult situation, but we're making progress, and I think it'd be a shame to give up at just the moment we're finally establishing some momentum."