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Pollack: 'Surge' Producing Real Progress in Iraq

Council on Foreign Relations

Interviewee: Kenneth M. Pollack, Director of Research, Saban Center for Middle East Policy
Interviewer: Bernard Gwertzman, Consulting Editor

August 2, 2007

Kenneth M. Pollack, a leading expert on Iraq, supplied intellectual arguments for the 2003 invasion of Iraq but then turned quite critical of the war. He now says after his latest trip to Iraq that though conditions remain difficult, there were significant improvements on the ground as a result of the U.S. “surge” policy. “We came away feeling that Iraq was absolutely a mess, the situation remained grave, but that we did have the right strategy, and that if any strategy could create stability in Iraq, it was the counterinsurgency and stability strategy that General David Petraeus had brought with him,” Pollack said.

You and your colleague, Michael E. O’Hanlon, wrote an op-ed for The New York Times on your recent trip to Iraq whose headline says: “A War We Just Might Win.” That sounds very optimistic. Can you elaborate?

We weren’t quite comfortable with the word “win” when we talked about using it in the piece, but nevertheless we came away from this trip feeling that there was more progress than we expected, especially in regard to creating security in some important parts of Iraq, and to a lesser extent in terms of local, political, and economic developments. That said, to us there were enough signs of life in the “surge” that it was worth allowing it to continue for some additional months to see if it could continue to make progress. We didn’t come away having decided the war in Iraq was won, everything was fine, and it was just a matter of time before we could put up a real banner that said “Mission Accomplished.”

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2007 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.