Matthew Yglesias has been asking what was accomplished by the surge in Iraq. His conclusion:
I take this all to be a reminder that “success” or “failure” of policy is interest-relative and that if you’re a normal person, the surge didn’t succeed in achieving anything at all. The best Exum could do in response to a skeptic is to say that the surge laid the groundwork for leaving years later thus saving me money relative to an endless occupation baseline. But we could, of course, have saved even more money by leaving sooner. Now needless to say there are lots of other interests in play other than the interests of the average American. Opting to surge rather than withdraw did lead to the death or maiming of many American soldiers. And opting to surge rather than withdraw cost the taxpayers a lot of money. But it also allowed important factions within the American national security apparatus to claim that withdrawal from Iraq was happening on terms of victory (we’re leaving because the country is stabilized because we’re awesome) rather than on terms of defeat (we’re leaving because the occupation is unworkable).I think he overstates the case for the surge. While it is true that the surge coincided with the situation in Iraq getting better, it also coincided with several other events that quite likely had a bigger effect.
Remember that the surge itself was a response to the dramatic defeat of the GOP in the 2006 mid terms.
Up to the 2006 mid-terms it made perfect sense for Iraqi nationals to regard the US military as an occupation force: That is precisely what it was. The single most important change in the situation in Iraq was the message sent by the US people: Hell no we are not going to stay in Iraq forever. The cause that the insurgents were fighting for was to get the US out of their country, to pretend otherwise is self-deception.
The mid-terms forced Bush's hand. Up to that point the response to evidence that a policy was not working was to try it harder. The mid-terms forced Bush to fire Rumsfeld and hand the management of the occupation over to Gates who promptly fired or isolated the policy people responsible for the majority of the blunders.
To the extent that the 'surge' made a difference, it was that the US stopped doing things that were only going to make the situation worse and started to employ the tactics that pre-existing US military doctrine would have directed in the first place had Rumsfeld not been allowed to run the show as an experiment.
The tactics employed in the surge were not novel concepts invented by Gen. Petreaus, the British troops employed the same approach from the start. Nor was the US military entirely ignorant of this approach: My friend at the Naval Postgraduate school tells me that they have been established for decades.
Yglesias is certainly right to point out that at best all that the surge has achieved is to allow the militarists to avoid the humiliation of a defeat. But the role of the surge was political, not military. The GOP defeat in the 2006 mid terms was the event that allowed the situation in Iraq to improve. The surge was merely a device that allowed the Bush administration to claim credit.
