Is There Anything the Surge Can't Do?
David Weigel | July 23, 2008, 9:24am
Witness: John McCain's
superior judgment on Iraq!
Colonel McFarland was contacted by one of the major Sunni sheiks. Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening. I mean, that's just a matter of history.
The surge began in early 2007. Here's what McFarland was saying about Anbar in September 2006:
With respect to the violence between the Sunnis and the al Qaeda—actually, I would disagree with the assessment that the al Qaeda have the upper hand. That was true earlier this year when some of the sheikhs began to step forward and some of the insurgent groups began to fight against al Qaeda. The insurgent groups, the nationalist groups, were pretty well beaten by al Qaeda.
Indeed, most reports credit the Anbar awakening with
beginning in September '06. Foreign policy reporter Spencer Ackerman first noticed the slip-up (if we can generously call it that), but it hasn't gotten much skepticism
from the broader media. I'm not sure why. It badly complicates McCain's already-weakened narrative about the war, that all was lost before he "had the courage" to push for a troop surge.
Fluffy | July 23, 2008, 10:20am | #
The strategic situation in Iraq is no better than it was in 2006.
We still continue to experience ongoing costs. The fledgling Iraqi state still cannot stand on its own, according to your OWN candidate. We have not been able to redeploy, rest, and refit our troops so that they can be available in the event of other strategic threats. Our credibility internationally is still shot. We've still inflicted unacceptable costs on our allies under false pretenses. None of that has changed at all.
Casualties are lower. That's important, but since you can't bring the dead back to life, it doesn't change the fact that our total losses to date are higher than our gains justify.
In order for Iraq to be a success, you would have to:
1. Magically cut our dollar costs from the war to the point where our achievement there justified those costs.
2. Magically bring the dead back to life and unwound the wounded to the point where our achievement there justified our losses.
3. Magically make the Iraq state one that can survive our departure without reverting either to a dictatorship or to chaos.
You can't do those things, so you can never make the Iraq war a "win".
What you've managed to do, so far, is avoid the embarrassment of having choppers taking people off the roof of our Iraqi embassy. But the fact that you haven't been embarrassed - yet - doesn't make the Iraq war a "win".
"Yeah, but we held on and devoted even more resources than we had already wasted, and we managed a stalemate! Yay us! You antiwar people should admit that you were always wrong now!" Put the crack pipe down.
joe | July 23, 2008, 10:23am | #
...in case you missed it the occupation hasn't ended
The occupation of Anbar was ended for a while, before the sheiks invited us back in. You used to talk about this yourself.
Further, the Anbar awakening was them coming to us for help in beating them. Which is exactly what I wrote; they turned against al Qaeda on their own, and asked us to help them fight al Qaeda.
If we had left, we wouldn't have been there to help them. True, which is why the slow withdrawal/end the occupation/leave forces in the area to fight al Qaeda as necessary withdrawal strategy advocated by people like Barack Obama throughout 2005-present makes more sense than the quick-and-total withdrawal strategy of people like Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich. Cleaning up the jihadist problem we caused was one area of agreement betweent the left and right.
Further, even though the people had started to turn against Al Quada in September, without the surge of forces, we wouldn't have been able to help them like we did. Unless we had removed troops from other areas in Iraq as part of the withdrawal, while leaving a force in the area for counter-terror operations - aka, the Murtha Plan.
Yes, it worked in no small part because things were starting to turn in September of 2006, but so what? So, the assertion that al Qaeda would have taken over Iraq without our continued occupation of the country has been disproven. As that was, and continues to be, the major argument for continuing that occupation, I consider this important.
It just means that the operation took advantage of an opportunity that presented itself. It was indeed an excellent job of taking advantage of an opportunity that presented itself. However, "the operation," meaning the Baghdad Security Plan, had nothing to do with Anbar, was not helped by events in Anbar, and in fact, troops were diverted from the BSP to Anbar to take advantage of this opportunity.
It is funny to hear you argue about this Joe. Why? I've been saying the same thing since before the 2004 election.
If Democrats were smart... Concern troll is concerned.
You just say "you were right about the surge, I am glad we won over there, now lets talk about gas prices and health care." Except he wasn't right about the Surge. Hell, he can't even tell when it happened, or how it worked. He told us it would reduce the ethnic violence in Baghdad, allowing enough political reconciliation that the Iraqi government and the US military would then be able to secure places like Anbar, where Iraqi insurgents and foreign jihadists were going to create a safe haven for al Qaeda unless we and the Iraqi government beat them. In reality, exactly the opposite happened. The ethnic violence in Baghdad went on unabated to completion, throughout the height of the Surge, while the locals in Anbar invited us to help them with their efforts to get rid of al Qaeda, yet remain hostile to and outside of the Iraqi government.
Pointing out that the dark imaginings of the hawks turned out to be false is surely a good move for Obama, but doing so certainly doesn't require him to rewrite history like that.
bookworm | July 23, 2008, 2:50pm | #
"We were never in much danger from Germany or Japan either, but we went right ahead and started an unnecessary war with them by sending massive shipments of arms to their enemies. 500,000 Americans dead in the prime of their lives to save a few Jews in Europe and help the Soviet Union conquer E Europe. What were we thinking?"
We shouldn't have been involved in that war either.
Regarding the fate of the Jews, there is a good argument that the war which Great Britain declared against Germany allowed for the Holocaust. The following is from the most recent "The American Conservative":
"Probably the most important reason that free discussion of World War II—the diplomatic blunders, the Allied atrocities, all the what ifs—has been frowned upon or suppressed is that some people perceive an implicit disregard for the unspeakable fate of Europe’s Jews. Yet it was the war itself that put Europe’s Jewish populations in danger in the first place, an obvious point that has been missed by all but a few writers."
"In February 1942, for example, Goebbels wrote in his diaries, “World Jewry will suffer a great catastrophe. … The Führer realizes the full implications of the great opportunity offered by this war.” A month later, after describing the deportations from Poland’s ghettos, Goebbels observed, “Fortunately, a whole series of possibilities presents itself for us in wartime that would be denied us in peacetime. We shall have to profit by this.”
“Because Britain issued the war guarantee to Poland and declared war on Germany,” writes Buchanan, “by June 1941 Hitler held hostage most of the Jews of Western Europe and the Balkans.” If he’s right, then with more sensible British diplomacy, the Jewish populations of Belgium, Denmark, France, Greece, Holland, Italy, Luxembourg, Norway, and Yugoslavia would have survived, just as the Jewish populations of Sweden, Switzerland, and the Iberian Peninsula did."
David Gordon, a (Jewish) scholar Buchanan thanks in his acknowledgments, has likewise wondered in light of all this: “Was it not a clear moral imperative to avoid the outbreak of war and, if possible, to secure the evacuation of the Jews from parts of Europe likely to fall under German control? Further, once war broke out, was it not imperative to end the war as soon as possible?” This, surely, is a morally serious position."
