December 14, 2007
Is The Surge Working?
We said in our liveblog coverage of the final Democratic presidential candidates debate yesterday that the military component of the "surge" strategy in Iraq was working . An Iraq war vet who is now ex-military and a foreign-policy wonk in Germany weighs in (unedited):
Primacy of the Iraq war as an issue has slipped, but not because a tapering off of violence. It is still pretty constant, just down a little from the bloodiest season we've had since Nov 04 when the second Fallujiah was going on.
He's right: Violence is down slightly from 2006 but is nothing to shout about. Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander on the ground, has been saying that violence is back to spring 2005 levels, which sounds good until you actually recall what the spring 2005 levels were: 846 U.S. troops killed, nearly 6,000 wounded. (See this writeup by Editor & Publisher's Greg Mitchell.)
In 2006, it seemed apparent that all was lost in Iraq, which is why we now have the surge strategy. Any slight improvement from that awful year has to be viewed with a lot of caution.
Our reader/veteran continues:
Short story: still violent, we're inured. While we're busy congratulating ourselves on our new counterinsurgency doctrine, the Anbar "turnaround" (which wasn't our accomplishment really, it ammounted to our being the lesser of two evils - something we are really good at), and the fact that Petraeus is on our side, the insurgency is going to grind along as it has done. It will just require another Fallujiah, Ramadi, Samara, An Najaf, or Fallujiah II to remind us that the problem is still there.
Petraeus himself and other U.S. ground commanders agree that the gains they are making could be completely reversed at any moment. Part of the reason Iraq has dropped from the headlines is that there haven't been any spectacular attacks resulting in heavy U.S. losses in quite some time. (Twenty-nine hostile deaths* each in October and November vs. 120 in May -- a huge drop-off.) Nor have we seen a catastrophic attack on Iraqi civilians since the quadruple bombings that killed more than 400 in August. The decline in violence can also be attributed to ethnic cleansing.
Yesterday, we wondered if Iraq was fading as a debate topic and "most important problem" among voters because Americans have given up hope for a positive resolution. "Republicans don't want to talk about Iraq because they're humiliated by the conduct of the war, and Democrats don't want to talk about it because they were wrong about the surge," David Brooks wrote in his column this week. Who's right? Write us.
BTW: I am withholding the reader's name until I get permission to print it -- that tricky time-zone difference. He worked at the State Department last year. I know him and can vouch for his biography.
*Click "U.S. Only" in drop-down menu.
Posted at 6:27 PM
Posted to:
Campaigns, David Petraeus, Iraq, Middle East, Military, WH 2008
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