When After All the Surges . . .
In addition to everything Larison says about how the so-called "success of The Surge" misleads one from the larger questions about the worth of the war in the first place, I’d add that the practical meaning of "The Surge" has changed while the pretended meaning has stayed the same.
The pretended meaning is, The US increased troop strength in Iraq for a period of time beginning in 2007. The actual meaning is, the US increased troop strength WHILE ramping up a program to pay off Sunni resistance leaders WHILE Iraq’s warring ethno-religious factions finished completely remaking Iraq’s demographic patterns, owing to tens-to-hundreds of thousands of dead and millions of exiled and internally displaced, WHILE the US turned the capital into a warren of barricades. The net result of all those changes has been a less obtrusively violent Iraq for the time being, and the whole arrangement is "The Surge" in practice, but the cheerleaders talk as if it was all due to The Surge in pretense. Meanwhile Iraq’s "calm" would count as calamity almost anywhere on earth but Darfur or Zimbabwe.
That’s leaving aside the essential truth that The Surge is not The War and The War remains a massive waste and a monstrous crime.
Comment by Leonard —
June 26, 2008 @ 12:04 am
Right on Jim. What clenched the bogusity of the thing for me was seeing the overlaid map of ethnic cleansing in Baghdad and violent incidents. The ethnic cleansing there was the main reason for the Surge’s success. Not even something the US did. Much less anything to be proud of.
One more factor to mention the very name of the Surge(tm). It’s supposed to connote temporariness. I would imagine that whatever it is called in Arabic preserves that connotation; in any case, the various players in Iraq cannot have failed to read what American politicians think about it.
So, say you’re gunning for power in Iraq, and the US promises to bring in extra troops for a short while. If you know anything about democracy, then it should be clear that the point of it is to get the Republicans through the 2008 election. But regardless, it’s clearly supposed to be temporary. So, do you continue your current level of operation, risking unnecessary casualties against the beefed-up Americans, or scale back and wait for the extra troops to desurge?
Comment by Bruce Baugh —
June 26, 2008 @ 1:08 am
Right at the moment, I think one Obsidian Wings thread sums up a lot of the problem very well. Eric Martin wrote one of those sensible basic-empathy posts multiplying the deaths in Iraq from recent horrors to scale them up for the US’s population, in hopes of sparking some thoughts about how awful it would seem to us to be living in the midst of a comparable rate of loss. The objections are fascinating, when I can stomach them. They include…
The unemployment rate is so much higher that it doesn’t matter as much, because the loss of one person in Iraq just doesn’t affect the economy so much.
The insular nature of Iraqi society means that you wouldn’t have contact with a lot of the people killed anyway, even if they’d lived nearby, so it doesn’t matter.
Like all poor countries, they have big families because they expect to lose kids along the way. Bombings and being gunned down by death squads and such isn’t that much different from dying thanks to bad health care, so it’s no big deal.
And on and on.
Someone on one of the blogs I read occasionally – Pandagon, maybe? – offered the remark that the Republican Party is now the umbrella organization for pretty much all Americans of the sort Altermeyer identifies as authoritarian followers. Seems right.
Comment by abb1 —
June 26, 2008 @ 3:22 am
Why, escalation in an illegal war of aggression can be classified as ’success’, albeit from a narrow angle.
A robber who managed to crack the safe in a bank holdup has been successful.
Comment by Monte Davis —
June 26, 2008 @ 8:09 am
C’mon, Jim — are you suggesting that the doughty Sons of Iraq are motivated less by a keen appreciation of the Petraeus Plan than by US money, materiel, training, and a chance to lay in the cut vis-a-vis Shi’a triumphalism?
Is there no limit to your cynicism?
Comment by Derek Copold —
June 26, 2008 @ 9:34 am
In a way, it’s even worse than a patch-up. The number of foreign fighters in Iraq has always been relatively low. We’ve been fighting the native militias. But now we’ve basically left the areas to them, which means they won. The troop surge was a sleight-of-hand designed to hide that fact.
Comment by Barry —
June 26, 2008 @ 11:45 am
“The ethnic cleansing there was the main reason for the Surge’s success. Not even something the US did. Much less anything to be proud of.”
Before the big 2006 ramp up in ethnic slaughter, Seymour Hersh was saying that various US officials were discussing an ‘El Salvador Option’, and making threats of a dirty war. Then Negroponte was appointed ambassador to Iraq. He was ambassador to Honduras during its dirty war, and when the gov’t of Honduras was supporting the Contras. Basically, he must have been involved in the killings of 100-200K people.
At that point, a very odd bombing of an important Shiite shrine was conducted (remember that the guards survived?!!? ‘Al Qaida’ guys tied them and gagged them, but forget the ‘cut their throats’ step), and voila! The really serious mass murder and ethnic cleansing kicked off.
Comment by Jonathan Goff —
June 26, 2008 @ 4:18 pm
Barry,
I’d be really surprised if our government were competent enough to pull something like that off without anyone blabbing it. I don’t necessarily buy the Al Qaida line either mind you, I just wouldn’t be so quick to believe our government could pull something like that off successfully.
BTW, Jim, thanks for repeating this meme. Your last post on this topic didn’t get much comment.
~Jon
Comment by TGGP —
June 26, 2008 @ 7:57 pm
David Friedman on Altemeyer.
Comment by joe —
June 27, 2008 @ 11:58 am
Good tactics in the service of a bad strategy. You’ve got to hand it to Patreaus for how he’s played the lousy hand he was dealt.
I remember writing way back when that a surge might make sense, as part of a withdrawal strategy. The greater security presence could serve to cool off acute violence to a meaningful degree, and that could make a decent political solution easier – but absent at least the announcment of a withdrawal and the renunciation of permanent bases and oil rights, just achieving marginally-better security isn’t enough to bring about such a political shift.