Keane: War is over

In the preceding session, Dr. Andrew J. Bacevich asked for justification before continuing current and future activities at war in central Asia. He is asking for the integrity of the action's justification. He finds none - a very courageous conclusion from a man who has given his posterity to maintain the ongoing war. I find myself in agreement with Dr. Bacevich. We need to reopen the justification.

In a rare appearance in Washington, General [George] Casey offered an optimistic but cautious assessment of the situation in Iraq, where he commands more than 140 thousand U.S. and coalition troops.

"We're actually a little further along than I thought we would be at this point."

The general said the Iraqi insurgency is still capable of launching devastating attacks, but he says it is weaker than it was a few months ago thanks to continuing offensive operations by his troops and the new Iraqi army and police.

"In general terms, they are falling off and not effective. We took a look at the election attacks, because we said, 'the elections ought to tell us something about the strength of the enemy.' Well, we saw about 300 attacks (and) maybe 70-percent of those were ineffective."

General Casey says the insurgents launch between 50 and 60 attacks every day, but try to carry out three or four times as many. He says the insurgents are more often resorting to relatively ineffective methods, such as drive-by shootings and by firing weapons from far away. The general says the coalition has reduced the insurgency's effectiveness by capturing or killing a large number of what he described as "second tier" leaders. --March 8, 2005

I'd say the cycle of Sunni-Shia violence has been (largely) broken, but the Arab-Kurd relationship might still be a ticking time bomb in my opinion.

I concur with the poster above--with high unemployment and oil prices at an all time low, this may have a drastic effect on Iraq's ability to employ police and military personnel (some predictions are that over 100,000 will be laid off) and hamper the ability to employ the SOI as part of the security plan.

I won't say all is doom and gloom, and the situation is admittedly far better than it was four years ago, but I would be guarded about claiming that the war is over.

Well, I did argue this point here a few months back. You tend to argue from anecdote to back up your political bias, which anyone who's taken a basic logic class knows is logically invalid. I simply quoted the figures to you and pointed out you were wrong. No need for a mea culpa.

With oil prices skyrocketing and Obama's lack of a realistic energy plan guaranteed to spike the price of oil to an all-time high in the near future, I'd say the economic situation will sort itself out.

I'd worry more about Detroit or Chicago than Baghdad.