A very tuned-in military intelligence guy I know, on his third tour to Baghdad, emailed me recently a little ground truth about the situation we rarely read about anymore since the Petraeus testimony.
I think part of the success is what we have done, but a lot of the credit goes to the infighting on both the SUNNI and SHIA sides... with so much effort going to kill each other they seem to have little energy left to target us...
He expects Petraeus to come back in the spring and say we should keep troops in place for another year or so, as the security situation is tenuous and can turn at the drop of a hat. Only then will Petraeus and company suggest we begin to cautiously draw down below the pre-surge troop levels.
His evaluation of the overall state of play:
The weak link in all this, is the tactical problems are not the issues...the levels of attacks are indeed lower than they were 4 months ago...but still higher than they were when we were here in 2005...tracking those numbers is a public affairs metric, not one tied to the ability of the government to get stuff done. The government is wedded to parochialism...Shias as a group will do nothing to help Sunnis...and in fact spend most of their time lately fighting other Shias...I think we are at the point that as long as our departure is on the calendar, the Shias and Sunnis will embrace strategies which accelerate that eventuality. If we say...or intimate we are here for the long term, both sides will raise levels of attacks in order to hasten our withdrawal...