By host Tom Ashbrook:

One month from now, General David Patraeus, the top US commander in Iraq, will be sitting in Washington reporting on the impact of the US troop surge. But the debate over what difference the surge has made and what to do going forward is already white hot.

Michael O’Hanlon and Anthony Cordesman, so-called “war scholars” with big reputations, came back from a military-guided tour of Iraq last month calling for Americans to hang in there, for “strategic patience.” Critics say they’ve got it all wrong.

This hour On Point: explosive progress reports — O’Hanlon, Cordesman, and the pushback on Iraq.

Guests:

Michael O’Hanlon, Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution. He is just back from Iraq and is co-author of the controversial July 30 op-ed in The New York Times, “Stability in Iraq: A War We Just Might Win.”

Anthony Cordesman, Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
He has just published a report on his recent trip to Iraq titled “The Tenuous Case for Strategic Patience in Iraq.” ;James Fearon, Professor of Political Science, Stanford University. His article “Iraq’s Civil War” appeared in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs.