Let me begin today’s posting by thanking all you loyal readers for coming back to us. We haven’t been blogging as often as we would like, but now that the summer doldrums are over, we promise a better flow of information.

Here in Washington, pols and soldiers alike are abuzz about the latest Bob Woodward book on the Bush administration. Excerpts have been appearing this week in the Washington Post. So far, the Post has printed pieces about the period leading up the surge in Iraq.

I find it particularly interesting because I was living in Iraq at the time and so I have a firsthand understanding of how decisions made in Washington landed in Baghdad. How those decisions came about has always been a mystery to me. I was especially fascinated by this section, which appeared in Sunday's Post, that describes the administration decision to surge troops in Iraq.

The problem during the Vietnam War, Bush told me in 2002, was that "the government micromanaged the war" -- both the White House and Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. Micromanaging the Iraq war from the White House had been a red line for Bush. The generals' words almost always were unchallenged gospel. He did not want to second-guess them.

That was about to change.

"We must succeed," Bush said. "We will commit the resources to succeed. If they" -- the Iraqis -- "can't do it, we will."

On the ground in 2005 and 2006, the war often felt like it was being managed by Washington. Indeed, the surge was the first time I felt like the decision-making process had shifted from Washington to Baghdad.

The decision to keep troops in mega bases, even as violence rose in Iraq, seemed like an effort, in part, to keep troop deaths down as the public was increasingly outraged by the increase in numbers (as it turned out, it may have had an opposite effect); the push to hand over responsibility to the Iraqi forces even though there was little evidence they could handle the growing violence at times felt like a U.S. political effort to say the Iraqis are taking control of their country (even though they couldn’t); and even the troop level itself seemed to be driven by concerns the U.S. was occupying Iraq instead of the need on the ground. 

The scores of handover ceremonies, in which the U.S. would “hand over” responsibility to the Iraqis, always captured this tension best. So often, I would attend one only to watch the province go back under U.S. military control before it was handed over to the Iraqi again, sometimes in a matter of months. At one ceremony, which included 1,000 Iraqis troops being handed Chinese –made plastic swords as gifts as commanders exulted the progress being made, a U.S. commander afterward told me the brutal truth.

“How does this handover to the Iraqis change your duties here?” I asked.

“It doesn’t,” he said. “This is just for show. ...We will be back on patrol tomorrow.”