Politicians speak; soldiers implement

Lots of talk about President Obama's speech about Afghanistan.
National Review's Rich Lowry looks at where the real action is going to be.
I went back and looked at Bush's speech announcing the surge. It holds up very well. It's prescient even. But at the time, as a piece of rhetoric, it didn't matter too much because basically no one was listening to Bush any more. It wasn't the words that saved the war, it was the incredibly courageous troops who went—finally, in sufficient numbers and with the proper strategic goal—into Baghdad neighborhoods and cleared out al Qaeda and the Shia militias. Those troops changed the dynamic of the war on the ground, and nothing else was as important.