Retired General Barry McCaffrey visited Iraq earlier this month to meet with senior commanders and to get a better sense of the situation on the ground. McCaffrey was hardly a proponent of the president's new strategy, and in January went so far as to call the surge a "fool's errand" in testimony to the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, but McCaffrey's after action report explicitly endorses that strategy.

McCaffrey says of the current situation that "since the arrival of General David Petraeus in command of Multi-National Force Iraq--the situation on the ground has clearly and measurably improved." Further, he says "we can still achieve our objective of: a stable Iraq, at peace with its neighbors, not producing weapons of mass destruction, and fully committed to a law-based government."

And in closing, he denounces any effort to undermine the surge or political support for it: "We now need a last powerful effort to provide to US leaders on the ground--the political support, economic reconstruction resources, and military strength it requires to succeed."

Of course, McCaffrey's report also detailed some of the serious challenges facing Coalition forces in Iraq, and Thomas Ricks, the Washington Post reporter who authored the best-selling book Fiasco, focused largely on those in his story today. Under the headline "McCaffrey Paints Gloomy Picture of Iraq," Ricks painted his own gloomy picture:

"The population is in despair," retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey wrote in an eight-page document compiled in his capacity as a professor at West Point. "Life in many of the urban areas is now desperate." . . .

His report also lists several reasons for some new optimism, noting that since the arrival of Petraeus last month, "the situation on the ground has clearly and measurably improved."

Nevertheless, his bottom line is that the U.S. military is in "strategic peril"--a sharp contrast to his previous views. In 2005, he concluded in a similar report that "momentum is now clearly with the Iraqi government and coalition security forces." In a 2006 assessment, he wrote: "It was very encouraging for me to see the progress achieved in the past year."

There's something in McCaffrey's report for everybody, but one would have to be profoundly pessimistic--inclined to view the whole Iraq project as an unsalvageable "fiasco"--to report that the bottom line of this story is that the U.S. military is in "strategic peril." The bottom line is that progress is being made, our objectives are attainable, and we face serious challenges in the months and years ahead.