A reader passes along this shameless
exchange from "Meet the Press":
MR. GREGORY: Let me ask you about the war in Iraq. In
April of 2007, this is what you said: "I believe myself that
... this war is lost and the surge is not accomplishing
anything." Were you wrong?
SEN. REID: David, I first met General David Petraeus in
Iraq. He was training the Iraqi forces at that
time. At that time, he knew it wasn't working.
After he became the commander in Iraq, he and I sat down and
talked. He said to me, and he said within the sound of
everyone's voice, "The war cannot be won militarily." I said it
differently than he did. But it needed a change in
direction. Petraeus brought that about. He brought
it about--the surge helped, of course it helped. But in
addition to that, the urging of me and other people in Congress
and the country dictated a change, and that took place.
So...
MR. GREGORY: But you said the surge was not accomplishing
anything. Even Barack Obama said last fall that it
exceeded everyone's expectations and succeeded beyond our
wildest dreams.
SEN. REID: Listen, at that--the time that statement was made,
the surge--they weren't talking about the surge. Petraeus
added to the surge some very, very interesting things that
changed things. He said a lot--just simply numbers of
troops is not going to do the deal. What we need to do is
work with the Iraqi people, which we haven't done before.
That's where the Awakening Councils came about, as a result of
David Petraeus' genius. He's done--he will be written
about in the history books for years to come. My original
statement was in keeping what David Petraeus said; that is, the
war cannot be won militarily.
With the possible exception of the sentence, "I first met General
David Petraeus in Iraq," everything that Reid says is
contradicted by history.
When Petraeus said the war couldn't be won militarily, he meant
that the war couldn't be won with military action alone, but only
with a more comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy that
involved working with local tribal leaders as well as using
diplomacy to improve the political situation. When Reid said the
war was lost, he meant the war was lost ... and that we should
withdraw troops from Iraq. Reid and the Democrats did want a
change in direction, but that change in direction was supposed to
be withdrawal, not the surge, which they referred to as an
"escalation" and fiercely opposed.
Yesterday Reid said that, "at that--the time that statement was
made, the surge--they weren't talking about the surge" -- but the
surge was proposed in January of 2007, and was already underway
when Reid made his statement in April of 2007. In fact, Reid's
statement was, "I believe ... that this war is lost, and this
surge is not accomplishing anything, as is shown by the extreme
violence in Iraq this week."
And Reid is right that simply adding more troops wasn't
sufficient to do the job, but they were still necessary to
implement the overall strategy.
