Kelley B. Vlahos, featured Antiwar.com columnist and contributing editor for The American Conservative magazine, discusses her article “Surge Finally Getting a Second Look?” about the dawning realization in military circles that David Petraeus is a stuffed shirt and the Iraq surge didn’t really work; how the “surge” fiction was packaged and sold as a comprehensive COIN strategy (not surprisingly a failure as well); why the media will eventually realize that, since Iraq and Afghanistan are total disasters, it makes no sense to praise Petraeus for his supposed “successes;” and why Americans weren’t paying close enough attention to discriminate between correlation (the “surge” and a decline in Iraq violence) and causation (the successful Shiite purge of Sunnis from contested areas).
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