May 29, 2009
Understanding the Surge in Iraq and What's Ahead
CNAS Senior Fellow Tom Ricks commented on the surge in Iraq and described what is ahead for American troops at an event hosted by the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
Ricks asserts that "There are three things the American people don’t understand about the war in Iraq right now: (1) how difficult the surge was and how different it was from the previous four years of the war; (2) that the surge failed, judged on its own terms; and (3) that the war is not over. In fact, I suspect we might be only halfway through it, which is to say that President Obama’s war in Iraq may well be longer than George Bush’s war in Iraq, which was five years and ten months old when Bush left office."
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