After the surge report: views on the war in Iraq - CBS News poll 14-16 Sep (pdf file).

No real public opinion shift after the Petraeus/Crocker testimony, if you don't want to click on the link.

I have a hard time understanding those who do not want to see metrics. They do not provide the whole picture, but they do provide critical data. If you define part of your mission as securing the population, then data that indicates whether or not the population is not being secured (i.e. increasing or decreasing numbers of dead civilians, increasing or decreasing sectarian migration) would appear to be somewhat important. Sure, no one may be laying IEDs for your patrols anymore, and the local militia appears quiescent. Perhaps this is because the militia has killed or expelled the local minority population, taken over their homes, and are now busy stripping their businesses for profit. Is this local progress? "Bottom-up" reconciliation? If you discount the dozen bodies found in the local garbage dump, or fail to recognize the 60 refugees who have just moved into abandoned homes, you just might think that's the case. After all, the place "feels" more peaceful and no one's shooting at you, no?

Uboat -

Yes, the Anbar awakening started before the surge but without help from us it would have died there. No one is lying about it and I am sick and tired of hearing people who do not have enough information to have an opinion on the issue make grand sweeping statements like "We're being lied to."
Does the President's quote below sound accurate to you?

Anbar Province is a good example of how our strategy is working. Last year, an intelligence report concluded that Anbar had been lost to al Qaeda. Some cited this report as evidence that we had failed in Iraq and should cut our losses and pull out. Instead, we kept the pressure on the terrorists. The local people were suffering under the Taliban-like rule of al Qaeda, and they were sick of it. So they asked us for help.

To take advantage of this opportunity, I sent an additional 4,000 Marines to Anbar as part of the surge.
RTK -

1. Horrbile analogy. There's a difference between listening and hearing. Most of the public has been hearing what they want to hear and not listening to the full story since the beginning of this war, typically hearing what suits their own preconceived notions.
I think you're missing the boat on this one. If most of the public is, according to you, only "hearing what they want to hear" and thus, I suppose, antiwar, you would not have seen public support for the Iraq War detioriate as it has --- it would have never been high at all. According to you, the public has always been antiwar. This is demonstrably false.

2. The Surge isnt' the strategy. Clear, Hold, Build is. What 1/1 AD was doing in Anbar that set the stage for the Anbar Awakening is a macro level of Tal Afar. People are missing the big picture here. The strategy has changed sginificantly in the last year. The surge has only accelerated progress with a new strategy.
As noted by David Kilcullen, success in Iraq has come largely by surprise and counter to expectations by surge planners. The surge was presented by the President and others, especially principle architects like MG Keane and Fred Kagan, as a means to secure Baghdad through an increased troop presence. This would, in turn, "buy time" for or spur national reconciliation. "Clear-hold-build" is nothing but a slogan, and a pretty meaningless one at that given that it has supposedly been the plan since 2005. Getting off FOBs and into neighborhood patrol posts has delivered tactical success in many places, but this is tactics, not strategy, and has certainly not been a cornerstone Iraq-wide policy until Petraeus & Co. arrived.

If that's the only metric you're looking at, then you aren't seeking the bigger picture. What improvements are being made in sewage disposal, water treatment, electricity per day, academic institutions, trash removal, medical services, and local security? If you're looking for body counts only, that's about the poorest metric I can think of.
Data about this has been posted repeatedly on this message board. The number of Iraqis with access to clean water has risen from 50% to 70% since 2003 (now with cholera outbreaks!), electricity per day remains flat, academic institutions have been devastated by violence and refugee flight, medical services are in the same place. Frankly none has been looking up, with the possible exception of local security and perhaps electricity.

Not in 4 years its not. TX Hammes makes an excellent point in a History Channel Documentary dated 2004, stating words to the effect that the Malaysian Counterinsurgency Campaign took around 15 years. Others have taken upwards of 40. So the gold standard in the last century is 15 years, with an average of about 25. The American people don't have the patience to prosecute a war they don't understand nor do they care about understanding. For the vast majority of them, it doesn't affect them.
If this is the case, then we probably should not get involved in insurgencies, since it is hopeless from the start.

BS. All many people care about is what Brittney Spears is doing this week or how OJ Simpson is going to get out the next jam. They could care less about what the strategic military objective in Iraq is, or, much less, how it's affecting the family of some poor Iraqi they'll never have to deal with anyway.
If this was the case, then public support would not be an issue. No one would care about whether or not the war was successful or not. Instead, polling indicates that the Iraq War is seen as the No. 1 issue facing the United States.

Leaving Iraq is morally and ethically irresponsible (How dare I bring morals and ethics into a discussion like this). Regardless of the reasons we invaded, however valid or invalid any of them are, we created the situation over there. I'm sick and tired of the same old line; "We haven't found WMDs," "This is about Oil," "We went there to fight Al Qaeda." At this point, 4 years into this, we need to get over ourselves and face reality. We're there. We're going to be there for a while. Deal with it. How do we, as an American people, make things better?
Are we in Iraq now for morality and ethics? Really? If so, one could question the priorities and tasking of our national resources, since there are many other areas where we could extend "morality and ethics" in our foreign policy and national governance.

I feel, as an American, like I'm on the New York Giants, with the entire country as the team. It's always someone else's fault and no one wants to accept responsibility for what's going on. The team sucks right now. No one is on the same page. Most people are so damned preoccupied with blaming someone else that they don't see the real issue right in front of their faces. We're in Iraq. We're tasked with building a government and providing security. We are. Not the Army, not the Marine Corps. We. What has John Q. Public done besides slap a yellow ribbon on his bumper or perhaps sent a package around Christmas? Not a damned thing.
John Q. Public has not been asked to do anything but sign off on whatever the President has put in front of him, which has been a politically spun happyface since Day 1. If the case had been put to the public in 2003 as rebuilding the government of Iraq and providing security and economic reconstruction for years on end with an eventual pricetag of $500+ billion and thousands of American lives, I doubt it would have ever sold.

If a leader had the courage to tell the American people that failure in Iraq is not an option, but actually laid out the real costs and sacrifices necessary for success, the American people might have responded. Hard to put all the blame on John Q. Public for not wanting to continue to be treated like mushrooms and being skeptical of the government's new storyline --- even if the new storyline might have more truth than the last.