Thomas Ricks, the Pulitzer Prize-winning military correspondent and former Washington Post Pentagon correspondent, has suggested recently that "at the end of the surge, the fundamental political problems facing Iraq were the same ones as when it began. The theory of the surge was that improved security would lead to a political breakthrough. It didn't. The improved security opened a window, but didn't lead to a political breakthrough. In that sense, the surge failed."
Ricks however, fails to note that the imminent drawdown of American troops in Iraq is about to take place on the backdrop of that "failure," and that the drawdown, like the surge before it, is doomed to failure for the same reason, namely the sectarian regime which both did their best to sustain as their agent in Iraq.
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