COVER STORY: "Strategy that's making Iraq safer was snubbed for years: It sounds simple: Get help from locals to stop bombmakers. But a USA TODAY investigation shows the Bush administration was slow to accept the idea," by Peter Eisler, Blake Morrison and Tom Vanden Brook, USA Today, 19 December 2007, p. 1A.

Good piece, if a bit of rehash in places, but some nice reporting on meets I've heard about but I hadn't seen covered before so prominently.

Petraeus gets a lot of credit, as I believe he should. I was glad to play a small role in elevating his profile when he was still back at Leavenworth--Mattis too.

Not every story of such efforts makes it into the press. In fact, most don't, so these reformers demand real respect, even if it took so long for guys like these two, plus Kagan and Krepinevich, to effect a breakthrough with the Bush team.

It may seem unfair to Bush to deny him credit for the current improvements in Iraq, but it's right to point out that the surge pales in importance to the COIN, which in turn--in Iraq-- owes much to Al Qaeda's screw-ups (going overboard, as always).

But clearly, these changes took too long.

So the win, such as it is, is logically handed to the change agents and not the political masters who took so long to convince--mostly due to their pride.