The Blog Formerly Known As Vote '08

From a recent op-ed in the Washington Post by Peter Mansoor, who was Gen. David Petraeus’s executive officer in Iraq from February 2007 to May 2008:

“The surge did not create the first of the tribal “awakenings,” but it was the catalyst for their expansion and eventual success. The tribal revolt took off after the arrival of reinforcements and as U.S. and Iraqi units fought to make the Iraqi people secure.

Over time, in areas where there were insufficient forces to provide security, U.S. commanders extended contracts to Sunni (and some Shiite) tribes that volunteered to stand up against al-Qaeda in Iraq.

….Improved security led to greater Iraqi confidence and lessened the need for, and acceptance of, Shiite militias that for too long held sway in many neighborhoods. When the Mahdi Army instigated a gun battle in Karbala last August that forced the cancellation of a major Shiite religious observance, the resulting public pressure compelled Moqtada al-Sadr to declare a unilateral cease-fire. Without the improved security conditions created by the surge, this cease-fire would not have been declared; nor could it have been observed, because the militia would still have been needed to protect Shiite communities from terrorist attacks.”

Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly points out -rightly, in my view- that this is the way the success of the surge should be described:

“Pro-war conservatives, when they write about the surge, too often try to defend obvious absurdities about how the surge was responsible for things like the Sunni Awakenings or the Mahdi Army ceasefire, even though both events started well before the surge. This is odd, because they’ve always had a much better argument to make, one that Mansoor comes close to making here.

Roughly, it goes like this: at the end of 2006, (a) the violence stemming from the bombing of the Golden Mosque had started to burn itself out, (b) the Awakening movement had begun turning Sunni tribes against al-Qaeda in Iraq, (c) ongoing sectarian cleansing, as horrible as it was, had created an opportunity for greater stability in Baghdad, and (d) Muqtada al-Sadr’s ceasefire, if we could persuade him to continue it, removed a huge source of sectarian violence. In other words, the security situation in Iraq was on the cusp of something potentially dramatic, and it was possible that a small nudge might make an outsized difference. The surge was that nudge.

We’re succeeding in Iraq right now not because our troops dropped out of the sky & made everything bettter; it was because our fine fighting men & women - under the praiseworthy leadership of General David Petraeus - threw out the existing playbook & adeptly adapted to conditions on the ground using the proven tenets of counterinsurgency strategy. 

What do you think?

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