Tag Archives: Surge

The soft bigotry of low expectations

With Bush leaving office, people are now scrambling to say something nice.  Now enter Peter Beinart, liberal hawk, whose bad foreign policy judgment has propelled him ever upwards, as it nearly always does in the accountability-free profession of punditry (cf. Tom Friedman).  The wronger you are, the more jobs you get.  Anyway, Beinart today counsels "liberals" (by which he means irony-free stoners with no sense of history, practicality, or self-awareness) to admit that the surge–the 2006 increase in troop levels in Iraq–worked, and that it was "courageous" of Bush to do so.  He writes:

It's no longer a close call: President Bush was right about the surge. According to Michael O'Hanlon and Jason Campbell of the Brookings Institution, the number of Iraqi war dead was 500 in November of 2008, compared with 3,475 in November of 2006. That same month, 69 Americans died in Iraq; in November 2008, 12 did.

Violence in Anbar province is down more than 90 percent over the past two years, the New York Times reports. Returning to Iraq after long absences, respected journalists Anthony Shadid and Dexter Filkins say they barely recognize the place.

Is the surge solely responsible for the turnaround? Of course not. Al-Qaeda alienated the Sunni tribes; Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army decided to stand down; the United States assassinated key insurgent and militia leaders, all of which mattered as much if not more than the increase in U.S. troops. And the decline in violence isn't necessarily permanent. Iraq watchers warn that communal distrust remains high; if someone strikes a match, civil war could again rage out of control.

Moreover, even if the calm endures, that still doesn't justify the Bush administration's initial decision to go to war, which remains one of the great blunders in American foreign policy history. But if Iraq overall represents a massive stain on Bush's record, his decision to increase America's troop presence in late 2006 now looks like his finest hour. Given the mood in Washington and the country as a whole, it would have been far easier to do the opposite. Politically, Bush took the path of most resistance. He endured an avalanche of scorn, and now he has been vindicated. He was not only right; he was courageous.

It's time for Democrats to say so.

He probably could have done better than this if he wanted to praise Bush's courage and wisdom, as he has admitted that perhaps the surge wasn't the cause of Iraq's improvement after all, and, for that matter, he can't really say Iraq has improved.  Well, it has in one sense.  Fewer US troops are dying.  I would say that if you going to make a strong causal claim such as this one, and psychoanalyze people who fail to see the causal connection you do, then you ought to have a more convincing case.

Surge protector

I heard this on the radio and thought it didn't make any sense.  Even though it's a politician, I'll break with tradition (that's "tradition" by the way, not "rule") and put it up here.  And if you're addicted to "balance," then go find some crazy equivalent howler by Obama so we can talk about that.  It's John McCain criticizing Obama on the surge. 

Oddly enough, my opponent advocates the deployment of two new combat brigades to Afghanistan — in other words, a surge. We're left to wonder how he can deny that the surge in Iraq has succeeded, while at the same time announcing that a surge is just what we need in Afghanistan. I'll leave all these questions for my opponent and his team of 300 foreign policy advisors to work out for themselves. With luck, they'll get their story straight by the time the Obama campaign returns to North America.

The only way this argument would work is if Obama had argued that "surges" (I'm weak on military strategy, but I don't think that's a kind of thing) do not work in principle–which, as far as I know, he didn't. 

I guess I would call this a rather straightforward case of suppressed evidence.  Afghanistan and Iraq are obviously different vis a vis military surging.  Reasons for surging in one place are not reasons for surging in every place.  

Blind squirrel

David Brooks lays out the case for Bush's military genius in advocating the "surge," which, by some accounts is having some success, by other measures, not very much.  Brooks's argument, however, turns out to hinge on the squirrel and nut principle: every now and then even a blind squirrel finds a nut.  He writes:

The additional fact is that Bush, who made such bad calls early in the war, made a courageous and astute decision in 2006. More than a year on, the surge has produced large, if tenuous, gains. Violence is down sharply. Daily life has improved. Iraqi security forces have been given time to become a more effective fighting force. The Iraqi government is showing signs of strength and even glimmers of impartiality. Iraq has moved from being a failed state to, as Vali Nasr of the Council on Foreign Relations has put it, merely a fragile one.

The whole episode is a reminder that history is a complicated thing. The traits that lead to disaster in certain circumstances are the very ones that come in handy in others. The people who seem so smart at some moments seem incredibly foolish in others.

The cocksure war supporters learned this humbling lesson during the dark days of 2006. And now the cocksure surge opponents, drunk on their own vindication, will get to enjoy their season of humility. They have already gone through the stages of intellectual denial. First, they simply disbelieved that the surge and the Petraeus strategy was doing any good. Then they accused people who noticed progress in Iraq of duplicity and derangement. Then they acknowledged military, but not political, progress. Lately they have skipped over to the argument that Iraq is progressing so well that the U.S. forces can quickly come home.

Never mind the parade of straw men here at the end–too many well informed people doubt that the surge has been a success by any of the proposed measures for Brooks to be so confident in their foolishness.  Now of course it turns out that even granting the success of the surge, there was no plan for afterwards.  Forget about that.  Consider that Brooks doesn't tell us how it is that can call Bush "courageous" or "astute."  To be courageous he would have had to risk something, to be astute he would have had to know something.  Even on Brooks's account he's merely lucky.  So is everyone else, of course, because "history is a complicated thing."