The long goodbye

The sixth anniversary of war in Iraq marks the first month of the beginning of the end. Are Iraqis ready to keep the peace when Americans quit the war? | Mindy Belz

Ahmad al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty Images

Type "counterinsurgency failure" into a popular search engine, and you will find papers on the great British counter-insurgency failure of 1776, the Russian failure in Chechnya, and American failures in Greece, the Philippines, and—naturally—Vietnam. You will find some ad hoc opinion pieces on counterinsurgency failure in Iraq, but you will search in vain to find a research paper suggesting that the surge in Iraq, which formally began in 2007, has failed.

That's because the facts on the ground suggest the opposite.

And that, even more than momentum from last November's polls, is the reason that President Barack Obama was able to stand before thousands of Marines at Camp LeJeune on Feb. 28 and declare: "By August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end."