WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush declared progress in the Iraq war Thursday, saying terrorists “are on the run” and a generally improved security environment should permit further U.S. troop reductions.

Standing on the Colonnade outside the Oval Office of the White House, Bush also announced that effective Thursday, the duration of troop tours in Iraq will be cut from 15 months to 12 months.

Bush said this reduction “will relieve the burden on our forces and it will make life easier for our wonderful military families.”

“The progress is still reversible,” Bush acknowledged. But he added, “There now appears to be a degree of durability in gains.”

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Bush declares significant progress in Iraq war

You can’t deny it, Iraq has shown great improvement, and it’s about time too. We have put in a lot of time, money, effort and, not to forget, many American lives to make this happen.

I never made any secret of the fact that I have always believed, and to this day continue to believe, Iraq wasn’t where we needed to go, especially at the time we went. I felt that Afghanistan was the REAL War on terror, I still do, and now we’re having to *ramp up* there once again because, after all, Iraq has become a much more peaceful place.

I still think that Iraq, in the early stages, after the Republican Guard was defeated and Saddam had been deposed, was the most ill managed excuse for an occupation that ever happened. Bush micromanaged Iraq and damned near caused this country to suffer the ultimate embarrassment, an *ass kicking* by a bunch of raghead insurgents.

It took several mission re-definitions, it took some catchy slogans, *The Surge*, and what it all boiled down to was this, someone finally got it through Bush’s thick head that he didn’t know his ass from 2nd base about war fighting and IF he seriously wanted to make his dream for Iraq come true, let the warfighters run the war.

This story, and the one just below it, tie in very well together, we must continue to fight the War on terror, we have NO choice, but that battle is going to always expand, soft targets will always be the ones that these terrorist look for. We can’t let the USA become that *soft target*.

WASHINGTON - Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates says that even winning the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan will not end the “Long War” against violent extremism and that the fight against al-Qaeda and other terrorists should be the nation’s top military priority over coming decades, according to a new National Defense Strategy he approved last month.

The strategy document, which has not been released, calls for the military to master “irregular” warfare rather than focusing on conventional conflicts against other nations, though Gates also recommends partnering with China and Russia in order to blunt their rise as potential adversaries. The strategy is a culmination of Gates’s work since he took over the Pentagon in late 2006 and spells out his view that the nation must harness both military assets and “soft power” to defeat a complex, transnational foe.

“Iraq and Afghanistan remain the central fronts in the struggle, but we cannot lose sight of the implications of fighting a long-term, episodic, multi-front, and multi-dimensional conflict more complex and diverse than the Cold War confrontation with communism,” according to the 23-page document, provided to The Washington Post by InsideDefense.com, a defense industry news service. “Success in Iraq and Afghanistan is crucial to winning this conflict, but it alone will not bring victory.”

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Pentagon: Terrorism to be threat for decades

Sec. Gates seems to be a master of *the understatement*, a lot like the eggheads that keep saying that California *could* have a massive quake sometime in the next 30 years. Safe bets, hedged bets, they works pretty well, and the probabilities are in your favor.

Terrorism will not go away, even with a full victory in Afghanistan and Iraq, terrorism won’t go away even if radical Islam is totally wiped out. Timothy McVeigh wasn’t an Islamic terrorist.

But maybe Gates is on to something, fighting terrorism with “irregular” warfare tactics?? What a concept! And verbiage is everything, semantics make it all seem so much better.

Irregular Warfare? Wasn’t that what the U.S. Army Unconventional Warfare Manual covered for years? Isn’t irregular warfare, and the necessity of it’s use one of the really important lessons we supposedly learned in Vietnam?

Let’s face facts, we turned up the heat in Iraq, and to do so we drew down our forces in Afghanistan, and there was a fairly rapid resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan. We turned up the heat and it now appears that many of the insurgents in Iraq, those not Iraqi themselves, have moved on to easier picking so to speak.

When we ramp up our efforts in Afghanistan, and I feel we must, I hope the DoD doesn’t forget that if we make it too tough on the insurgents there, they’ll simply move on to less challenged areas.