CSIS, 16 Jan 07: The New Bush Strategy in Iraq: Is Victory Still Possible?
...The new Bush approach is considerably more sophisticated and comprehensive than the one the President could fit into his 20-minute address – which had been cut back from a longer 40-minute version. It combines political, military, and economic action in ways that do offer a significant hope of success. The following analysis examines the strengths and weaknesses of the proposals in the President’s speech in detail, but also adds important further details and clarifications by Secretary of State Rice, Secretary of Defense Gates, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Peter Pace.

A reading of these additional details is far more reassuring than the bare bones of the President’s speech, but it is clear that the new strategy and plan still do involve several critical risks, the most important of which are political and military.

The most critical such risk is that the success of his strategy depends on the cooperation of a weak and divided Iraqi government that may not agree with his desire to deprive Shi’ite militias of their growing power, on Iraqi forces that so far have shown little fighting capability and key elements of which are corrupt or allied with Shiite and Kurdish militias, and on the acceptance of a major US urban warfare campaign by a divided Iraqi people, many of which are hostile to the US and the presence of US forces....