The Basis for the Surge

The reading list for July 2007 that I just posted reminded me of a lot of the material I was reading from June-August of last year, much of it about Iraq. The war wasn't going well then, either on the ground in Iraq or back home in the United States. The war seemed to be going badly in ways that raised questions about the military and political leadership of the U.S. The titles of the bestselling books about the war indicated the state of mind in Washington and New York - and possibly in Baghdad. State of Denial, by Bob Woodward, calls up the image of a president and an administration out of touch with the problems on the ground, and trying not to admit that there are any problems in need of new solutions. Fiasco, by Thomas Ricks, with its image of an [empty] flask, evokes a situation in which an enormous amount of blood and treasure has resulted in nothing. And Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City is, in some ways, even worse, because it portrays the people on the ground, the ones closest to the situation, hermetically sealed into a space capsule where they never see an Iraqi.

Bad stuff. Lots of bad stuff was happening.

And then the surge happened.

Senator McCain likes to say that he pushed for the surge, he supported the surge, and that the surge was a new strategy for the Iraq war. As far as I can tell, that is true to the extent that McCain supported additional troops for Iraq. That was, in strategic terms, extremely risky. One of the basic principles of military strategy is don't reinforce defeat! Don't, in other words, throw good money after bad. It also might have seemed to violate another strategic axiom: Don't put your forces into battle piecemeal! I don't know how much the Senator from Arizona contributed to the real novelty of the surge, which was, as a friend of mine phrased it today, indigenous participation. The whole point of the surge was to put something into the empty slogan that U.S. troops would stand down as Iraqi troops stood up.

The problem before the surge was that the people who might have wanted to oppose the insurgencies (and there were several of them) didn't dare, and the Iraqi security forces, to the extent they weren't part of the problem, weren't able to make that potential opposition feel safe. The surge put enough U.S. troops on the ground to make some Iraqis feel that the insurgents might not be the winning side. Some of the Sunnis turned on Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Some of the Sunnis allied themselves with the U.S. forces. Some of the Shiites started pushing back on the Mahdi Army and other militias. And those changes elicited from the Iraqi people other changes in the same direction.

In short, the surge set in motion a virtuous circle, a spiral moving and expanding in the right direction. If you want to see where the circle was going before the summer of 2007, read any of the books I mention in "Knight's Reading List VII: July 2007."