John Burns on the Hugh Hewitt Show

I missed the broadcast, but the transcript from Hugh Hewitt's interview with the New York Times' John Burns has been posted at hughhewitt.townhall.com.

An excerpt:

HH: I’m talking with John Burns, London bureau chief of the New York Times, five years a veteran of the war in Iraq, where he served as bureau chief for the New York Times. Mr. Burns, stepping back and recalling the time when the surge got underway, and you have a very extensive relationship with David Petraeus, and from our previous conversations, I know you admire him quite a lot. Did you give him any chance to have achieved what has been achieved there? Or is this what you expected would happen?

JB: You know, I don’t think…as speaking for myself, I was pretty skeptical, as I think most of us were. We had seen four years in which the situation at every turn that we hoped for a turn for the better appeared to turn for the worse. It’s now commonplace in Washington, D.C., to say that the war was well on its way to being lost by December by 2006. And so you know, if you’d been a betting man, you’d have had to say that the odds were heavily against the kind of success that General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker have had there. And it’s not alone, of course, the fact that they’ve had an additional 30,000 American troops, which are now in the process of being withdrawn. But other factors, all of which, if you will, one connected to the other, but the fact that the Sunni awakening, the turning, if you will, of very important elements in the Sunni community that had been either tacitly or overtly in support of the insurgency, who have now turned around and are working with the Coalition forces, the Americans and the Iraqis. That’s had a remarkable effect, as have had the ceasefire by Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shiite militia leader. There are many factors here, but however you measure it, the fact is that an enterprise which was attended by a great deal of skepticism when it began, a great deal of skepticism in Washington, D.C., in the Congress as you’ll recall, has had a remarkable success, which remains, as I think the phrase that General Petraeus used on the Hill a few weeks ago, it’s fragile and reversible.

Hewitt also asked Burns abot other metrics of success, such as business and electricity. Burns said that private enterprise is humming and that oil revenue has started to pour in, but that electricity and medical services will not progress significantly for a good while because of a lack of infrastructure.