Sometime ago I wrote a blog or an article about how people connect actions to results without careful examinations of the relationship. Keeping the tigers away is a reference to a hippie sitting on a park bench snapping his fingers to keep the tigers away.
Reading "The War Within" by Bob Woodword I got a good sense of how the "surge" in Iraq was not a major factor in an improvement. The major factor was appointing General David Petraeus as commander in Iraq (pp. 335-337).
Petraeus assembled his own team to evaluate the situation. It included Colonel H.R. McMaster who led the Tall Afar campaign, the only apparent successful clear, hold, and rebuild campaign, and Derek Harvey of the Defense Intelligence Agency, one of the few people who had gone out and spoken, in Arabic, with many of the factions in Iraq. His team went out all over Iraq to assess the situation and find out what was really going on. Petraeus himself went out into the streets to see what had been happening; he was appalled at the "ghost towns" of once prosperous sections.
Now Petraeus is in charge of both Afghanistan and Iraq. Will he bring about lasting change in either?
