No The Surge Did Not Work

A Republican (Fox?) talking point, at least at the beginning of the week was that it was obvious that the surge had worked, though Obama just can't admit it (as shown by Katie Couric). I wasn't all that happy with Obama's responses but basically agreed with him. Sure violence was down but that was predictable with more troops. The real problem was that the purpose of the surge was to bring down violence so that political progress could be made, and there has been no political progress. And there was other stuff about how we were bribing insurgents not to fight and that's what was working.

Juan Cole in Informed Comment writes A Social History of the Surge, which is a much more detailed looked at what happened.

"For the first six months of the troop escalation, high rates of violence continued unabated. That is suspicious. What exactly were US troops doing differently last September than they were doing in May, such that there was such a big change? The answer to that question is simply not clear. Note that the troop escalation only brought US force strength up to what it had been in late 2005. In a country of 27 million, 30,000 extra US troops are highly unlikely to have had a really major impact, when they had not before."

"As best I can piece it together, what actually seems to have happened was that the escalation troops began by disarming the Sunni Arabs in Baghdad. Once these Sunnis were left helpless, the Shiite militias came in at night and ethnically cleansed them. Shaab district near Adhamiya had been a mixed neighborhood. It ended up with almost no Sunnis. Baghdad in the course of 2007 went from 65% Shiite to at least 75% Shiite and maybe more. My thesis would be that the US inadvertently allowed the chasing of hundreds of thousands of Sunni Arabs out of Baghdad (and many of them had to go all the way to Syria for refuge). Rates of violence declined once the ethnic cleansing was far advanced, just because there were fewer mixed neighborhoods."

And about political progress in Iraq...

"Al-Maliki lost his national unity government in summer, 2007, just as casualties began to decline. The Islamic Virtue Party, the Sadrists, and the Iraqi National List are all still in the opposition. The Islamic Mission Party of al-Maliki has split, and he appears to remain in control of the smaller remnant. So although the Sunni IAF has agreed to rejoin the government, al-Maliki's ability to promote national reconciliation is actually much reduced now from 14 months ago."

When all this started, Congress set out 18 benchmarks to be used to measure progress in Iraq. So what about those? At first (July 12, 2007) the White House said Iraq's progress on 8.5 (really) of the benchmarks was satisfactory. Shortly after that (Sep 7, 2007), the GAO's initial report said Iraq had met only 3 and partially met 4 of the 18 benchmarks. It was still 3 on Jan 24, 2008.

Jul 2, 2008 a leaked US Embassy in Baghdad report says Iraq has met 15 of the 18 benchmarks. "Since the September assessment, the report notes, the Iraqi parliament has passed significant legislation on de-Baathification reform, the division of powers between the central and provincial governments, and amnesty for former insurgents. It grades progress in all of those areas as newly "satisfactory" even as it acknowledges that the laws in most cases have been implemented slowly, if at all. Congress mandated that Iraq both "enact and implement" the benchmark laws."

At least one congressman gets it. "Rep. Mike McIntyre, D-NC, who requested the administration's updated assessment, scoffed at the May report, which he says uses the false standard of determining whether progress on a goal is "satisfactory" versus whether the benchmark has been met. He estimates that only a few of the 18 benchmarks have been fully achieved."


The last GAO report (July 23, 2008) doesn't break it down by benchmarks but reviews the presidents New Way Forward plan from Jan 2007.

"However, as of July 2008, 8 of 18 provincial governments do not yet have lead responsibility for security in their provinces, and DOD reported that, in June 2008, less than 10 percent of Iraqi security forces were at the highest readiness level and therefore considered capable of performing operations without coalition support. The security environment remains volatile and dangerous. In the legislative area, Iraq has enacted key legislation to return some Ba'athists to government, grant amnesty to detained Iraqis, and define provincial powers. The unfinished Iraqi legislative agenda includes enacting laws that will provide the legal framework for sharing oil revenues, disarming militias, and holding provincial elections. On economic and infrastructure issues, Iraq spent only 24 percent of the $27 billion it budgeted for its reconstruction efforts between 2005 and 2007. Although crude oil production improved for short periods, the early July 2008 average production capacity of about 2.5 million barrels per day was below the U.S. goal of 3 million barrels per day. In addition, while State reports that U.S. goals for Iraq's water sector are close to being reached, the daily supply of electricity in Iraq met only slightly more than half of demand in early July 2008."

I haven't mapped those to the benchmarks. And apparently the law that enacted those benchmarks only required an initial report, not followups, so it's not clear we'll get one from an unbiased source (the GAO is non-partisan). Oh and remember, the surge is ending because it's scheduled time is up not necessarily because it succeeded. The US military is stretched thin by Iraq and this was as long as we could sustain those troop levels.

Arianna Huffington gets it right: "Despite the revisionist re-writes, we didn't go to war because we were committed to demonstrating that America could unleash violence in Iraq and then, five years later, curb it through the use of reinforcements. We went to war because we were told Iraq posed a grave and imminent threat to our national security and, secondarily, as a means of fomenting democracy throughout the Middle East. Of course, the "imminent threat" turned out to be non-existent, and our presence in Iraq has strengthened the hand of every bad actor in the region: al Qaeda is safe and adding recruits, Hamas has come to power in Palestine, Hezbollah has reasserted itself in Lebanon, and Iran has become the strongest player in Iraq. Meanwhile, the reduction in casualties in Iraq is starting to be offset by increased casualties in Afghanistan -- once again showing the fatal ignorance of stealing from Peter to stop-loss Paul and keep him in Iraq. So, tell me again: how is the surge working?"