Read Kevin on the surge. His interim report on the venture's progress is much more informative than anything Petraeus is likely to offer up.
One additional note: The surge is doing nothing -- absolutely, literally nothing -- for political reconciliation. And without that, peace is impossible. Folks forget this, but the strategy of the surge was not merely military -- it wasn't simply to increase security, because that would be a Good Thing. Rather, it sought to increase security in order to give the Iraqi government breathing room to advance reconciliation. That hasn't happened. Not only has it not happened, but the Iraqi government's failure has been so total we're thinking of ditching the Iraqi government. Which wasn't the point of the surge. To talk about this in terms of casualties is to move the goalposts. That the surge has produced no political reconciliation and in fact undermined the closest thing to a centralized authority in Iraq suggests that it's been a complete failure, regardless of the security improvements it did (or, depending on who you believe, did not) deliver.
