A Peek at What General Petreaus's Report Might Look Like

By Rick Moran

Respected milblogger Austin Bay makes gives us some intelligent speculation on what might be in the report given by General Petreaus when he goes before Congress next month.

In addition to what one might expect in such a report - levels of violence, numbers of trained troops, etc., there may also be some interesting political metrics that Petreaus will highlight to show progress.

Here are a few of the metrics Bay speculates Petreaus might use:

(3) Number and locale of police precincts judged competent and minimally corrupt (and don’t mention Chicago to me — I know minimally corrupt applies to places in the US — like every Texas border town)

(4) Number of “extremist violence” related incidents (incline, steady, or decline) and location of incidents

(5) An assessment of the “demonstrated commitment” of key sheiks and local leaders in terms of cooperating with security forces and development teams – perhaps analyzed on a neighborhood by neighborhood level.

(9) Competence of key ministry officials and senior department heads — Interior and Defense — as well as an estimate of their commitment to a free, federal Iraq, [This leads to an assessment of provincial and national leaders commitment…)

(10) “Infrastructure protection” trend lines — are power lines, pipelines, key installations being protected?

Since so many lawmakers have already decided whether the surge is working or not - especially Democrats - Petreaus's report is probably going to have to knock their socks off in order to change many minds. Given the news over the last 6 weeks coming out Iraq, he has a chance of doing just that.