It's over

It's official.  The surge if over.  President Bush said so today.  The surge of roughly 30,000 troops to Iraq that he initiated last year has achieved significant gains.  While it is clear the war on terror is not over, the battle for Iraq is going very well.

All five brigades of surge troops returned home from Iraq in July, a month which saw violence drop to "its lowest level since the spring of 2004," Mr. Bush said. Pentagon numbers indicated that the 11 U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq was actually the lowest monthly toll of the entire war.

Mr. Bush also announced that starting Friday, U.S. troops deployed to Iraq will serve 12-month tours instead of extended 15-month tours.

The president said that Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, will soon make recommendations on future troop levels, which he said will include "further reductions in our combat forces as conditions permit."

Comments

[JR]

Good news indeed. Of course, the left will a barrage of complicated and improbable reasons as to why the simplest and most obvious explanation, that the surge worked, is not the real reason for the significant gains in Iraq.

[Tom Bowler]

Our friends on the left would rather die than admit George W. Bush was right about something. On second thought maybe it's the rest of us they would rather have die, given their insistence on losing the war in Iraq and the war on Terror.