This time with full Sunni participation, and more input from local groups and authorities. Don't know if that would make things better or not.

A "bottom-up" approach is central to counterinsurgency, and I will readily agree it's something that should have been learned earlier (every war seems to involve painfully learning that you can't fight it like the last one).

But I don't recall anyone else in Washington pushing the "surge/COIN" approach a couple of years ago either. In fact, as I remember it, when the idea of Petraeus and the strategy change first came up, Democrats were as firmly against that as they have been everything else.

I'd be perfectly happy with an eventual Iraq victory, and Democrats smugly believing they would have won it years ago (with every memory of years of Democratic demands for immediate withdrawal and capitulation neatly wiped from the group mind.)

Heck, they've already thoroughly wiped out their headline-grabbing derision of Petraeus' progress report.