Progress in Iraq has always been about teams of people and teams of teams - and ultimately about young men and women, Iraqi as well as people from the coalition.

The Sunni Arabs began to realize that they had made a huge mistake by not voting in the election of 2005 and by not being part of the new Iraq. They had reasons for this: They were effected by the disestablishment of the military and by de-Baathification (the dismantling of Saddam Hussein's party) in winter 2007-2007. They increasingly recognized that their future lay in being part of the solution rather than a continuing part of the problem.

We cleared many of their towns and cities and rural areas of al-Qaida Iraq and other insurgents.

There has, indeed, been very substantial progress in Iraq over the past year - violence is down by 80 percent, civilian deaths by about the same, and so on.

If you don't want to have to kill or capture every bad guy in the country, you have to reintegrate those who are willing to be reconciled and become part of the solution instead of a continued part of the problem. And then, above all, the resources.

If you look at casualties, you find countries that had much higher loss rates per capita than the US. Denmark comes to mind, the United Kingdom, they have suffered heavy losses at various points, the Germans as well.

I did a week-long assessment in 2005 at (then Defense Secretary Donald) Rumsfeld's request. Following our return, I told him that Afghanistan was going to be the longest campaign of what we then termed "the long war."