Senior official: 2008 crucial to surge success

[unhappycamper]

Senior official: 2008 crucial to surge success
By Sean D. Naylor - Staff writer
Posted : Tuesday Feb 12, 2008 20:19:06 EST

The military’s surge in Iraq “is clearly working,” but many hurdles remain on the path to the stability that was the strategy’s ultimate goal, while al-Qaida in Iraq “remains a potent force,” according to the senior Defense Department official responsible for Middle East policy.

“We are finishing up what I consider to be the first phase of the surge,” retired Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for near eastern and south Asian affairs, said at the National Defense Industrial Association’s special operations and low-intensity conflict symposium in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday.

When President Bush announced that he was proceeding with the surge strategy on Jan. 10, 2007, “it was a controversial decision…which many in the government — most notably, many in the military — did not support,” Kimmitt said. “But frankly it was becoming quite apparent that the current strategy wasn’t working, the conditions on the ground were deteriorating and the violence was growing on a … day to day basis.”

Thirteen months later, “although there’s much work to be done, the military surge is clearly working,” said Kimmitt, who previously was the senior military spokesman in Iraq. “It has succeeded to this point not simply because of the decision of the president but also because of the operational shift to a more counterinsurgency-type model rather than the one that we were working before, the one that some people call ‘transitional kinetics.’” The surge’s success is also due to “the great leadership that we have on the ground … leaders whose brilliance has been demonstrated and validated over the past year,” he added.

But, Kimmitt said, other factors behind the successes of the past year, such as the Sunni Awakening movement in which Sunni tribesmen in Anbar province who had been part of the insurgency turned against al-Qaida, and the ceasefire called by firebrand Shi’a cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army (known by its Arabic initials JAM) came as a surprise. “The success of the surge was not pre-ordained nor has the surge succeeded according to plan,” he said. “No-one last December <2006> had any ideas that we would see a Sunni Awakening movement, nobody knew that the JAM would declare a ceasefire, nobody could forecast the brilliant successes of our special operators against al-Qaida, but as everyone knows, fortune favors the bold and chance favors the prepared mind.”


Rest of article at: http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/02/military_kimmitt_080212/