Such a statement is unthinkable, but if given it to the public, it would be true.
All the progress to a better Iraq is the outcome of military and political progress of Iraqi, still not perfect, but on the way onward a unity-state with balanced power and growing confidence in a peaceful future for all, by the time the common enemy of terrorists and foreign occupiers are gone and no foreign dominant influence becomes instead.
That’s reasonable, because the Arab Shiite majority does not want the Sunni hegemony by support of Saudi Arabia and does not want the country ruled by Persian Shiites. Sunni Arabs don’t want to be cut off from the oil wealth in Kurdish an Shiite regions. The Kurds need the strength of a unity-state for their own security. So, at last Iraqi have discovered they need each other and together they can get rid of all the foreigners, Al Qaeda, the USA, the UK and all others. By then they demanded a planned withdrawal to be finished in 2010.
As true as this is, it can not be said by a presidential candidate.
So you read this:
Katie Couric: Senator McCain, Senator Obama says, while the increased number of US troops contributed to increased security in Iraq, he also credits the Sunni awakening and the Shiite government going after militias. And says that there might have been improved security even without the surge. What's your response to that?
McCain: I don't know how you respond to something that is as-- such a false depiction of what actually happened. Colonel MacFarland was contacted by one of the major Sunni sheiks. Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening. I mean, that's just a matter of history.
But we know that de Sunni Awakening Forces began to form with the help of Saudi Arabia to fight the foreign Al Qaeda combatants a year before the surge. In fact, as Spencer Ackerman and Ilan Goldenberg have reported, the record firmly establishes the opposite: instead of being caused by the surge, the key signs of the Anbar Awakening occurred not only before that strategy was implemented, but before it was ever conceived.
And here is the NY Times talking about the Anbar Awakening back in March 2007.
The formation of the group in September shocked many Sunni Arabs. It was the most public stand anyone in Anbar had taken against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, which was founded by the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Residents in parts of Anbar say the split in the Sunni insurgency is widening, with moderate tribal leaders and nationalist guerrillas pitted against fundamentalist warriors and rival tribes. That has led to a sharp increase in Sunni-on-Sunni violence across Anbar, especially in the past week, deepening the chaos of Iraq's civil war.
And here is Colin Kahl in Foreign Affairs:
The Awakening began in Anbar Province more than a year before the surge and took off in the summer and fall of 2006 in Ramadi and elsewhere, long before extra U.S. forces started flowing into Iraq in February and March of 2007. Throughout the war, enemy-of-my-enemy logic has driven Sunni decision-making. The Sunnis have seen three "occupiers" as threats: the United States, the Shiites (and their presumed Iranian patrons), and the foreigners and extremists in AQI. Crucial to the Awakening was the reordering of these threats.
This is not controversial history. It is history that anyone trying out for Commander in Chief must understand when there are 150,000 American troops stationed in Iraq. It is an absolutely essential element to the story of the past two years. YOU CANNOT GET THIS WRONG.
