Bobo and various other neocons have been on a crusade to get liberals to “admit that the surge worked”. This is part of a larger effort to rehabilitate George W. Bush, the Iraq War, and neoconservatism.
Of course, there’s no doubt that violence did start to go down a great deal in Iraq about six months after the so-call surge began in Iraq. Bob Woodward (here; here) attributes this to strategic operational changes that had little to do with having more troops there. Juan Cole thinks that ethnic cleansing — of Badhdad Sunnis by Baghdad Shiites — played a large role.
Maybe it’s impossible to know for certain, but it seems very unlikely to me that a small increase, percentage-wise, in the number of troops in Iraq could have caused the decrease in violence. But maybe that’s because I hate freedom.
Yutsano
This. The “surge” success may have just been a meeting of serendipitous factors out of the control of any one entity. Plus remember a large part of the surge was bribing the locals into passivity. It turns out all the Iraqis wanted was jobs too!
Mike Kay (Team America)
There was some college who did a Night-Lights study of Iraq as the surge took place, and they concluded that ethnic cleansing had took place because of so many dark regions.
The thing is the media barely scratched the surface in reporting the amount of violence that occurred in Iraq. We heard about the big bombs in market places, but we never got a sense of the systematic warfare the occurred by all the participants.
C Nelson Reilly
You probably still call them French fries
freelancer
Liberals are just repeating this the same way they wouldn’t acknowledge that Nixon’s strong response to the Paris Peace talks put the enemy on their heels in Vietnam.
What is this? Why can’t there be some acknowledgement in the national media that the war was fucked from the start? And no, I’m not referring to Maddow wanting Obama to be mean/honest about Bush. I could care less about liberal’s fee fees at this point.
I’m talking about why every network, paper, and media outlet adopts conservative framing without any hint of skepticism. It’s ridiculous.
morzer
Good old-fashioned bribery may have been the major factor, rather than any sort of operational brilliance.
Steve
I think the obsession with the surge is more of a partisan thing than a neocon thing. For the neocons, it’s important to establish that the Iraq thing was a glorious concept from the start. For the partisan Republicans, it’s more important just to establish that Bush was right and Obama was wrong… about SOMETHING, at any rate.
The actual surge debate is, as I think DougJ acknowledges in this post, yet another example of the triumph of a simplistic talking point over nuance.
Robert
The strategery was to ramp up forces to bring down the violence to allow the Iraqi government some “breathing room” in order to get their shiite together.
Here we are, two years later, and the Iraqi government is still a basket case.
Heckuva job, Maliki…
Mike Kay (Team America)
I’ll make bobo a deal, I’ll recognize the surge, the day they admit invading iraq in the first place was wrong.
DougJ
@morzer:
Relative to what they had been doing earlier, bribery was a brilliant strategy. To be honest, I think that when it comes to these things, bribery is almost always a brilliant strategy, by any measure.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Robert: exactly, they’ve been shifting the goalposts on the surge for almost three years now. Even a lot of liberals bought into it. I don’t know how many times I saw Tom Ricks saying “it failed”, only to see people like Joan Walsh say “As Tom Ricks’ new book proves, I was wrong about the surge”
Martin
It’s almost as though the Sunni awakening and the strategic changes never happened. Like virtually everything in life, big complex problems are rarely solved by single events. The surge certainly helped, but so did a number of other things.
The problem with the neocon argument is that the case against the surge by liberals was made without knowledge of the other events that contributed to the ultimate success, and the neocons themselves couldn’t anticipate those events either. The argument was that more troops was all that was needed to solve the problem, because that’s all they were offering. Would we have been successful with those events and without the surge? Who knows, but if we would have been, it’s likely to have taken longer – maybe longer than we would have been willing to tolerate. Would the surge alone have gotten us where we are without those other events happening? I seriously doubt it. Liberals were not wrong at the time.
ItAintEazy
So the neocons now want credit for partially unshitting the bed they shat in the first place?
Heh, good luck with that.
Lev
I don’t think an elite consensus that the surge worked will change much of anything. At best, the Iraq War will be a quietly forgotten mishap in our history, like the War of 1812. Realistically, it will be the attack that Republican presidential candidates will be dodging from Democrats for the next 25 years.
MAJeff
@Mike Kay (Team America):
This:
Those of us who were in the streets were right. Period. Until the fuckwits like Bobo admit that, why should we take them seriously? Why should we give them the benefit of the doubt by accepting their post-invasion issues. I have yet to hear any of them say, “The invasion and the war were wrong.”
We. Were. Right. Motherfuckers.
Mike Kay (Team America)
@Steve: yes, this about misdirection. McCain did this during the campaign: “he won’t admit that he was wrong about the surge” he would cry about Obama. Of course the media would take the bait and thereby excuse McCain (to paraphrase his words) for refusing to admit McCain, himself, was wrong for supporting the invasion in the first place.
morzer
@DougJ:
It’s a rational strategy, although not really an operational one, in military terms. The problem is that people keep making Petraeus into a uniquely talented soldier, rather than a smooth operator who caught a break.
I would say that in counter-insurgency the US needs to forget the idea of overwhelming force or nation-building. Bribery seems to work rather better, and is cheaper in the long term.
Martin
@DougJ: Among other things, it was a cheaper strategy. To this day I’m still pissed and amazed that we directly relied on contractors to wage a war. Of all the things for the worlds sole superpower to outsource…
hilzoy
I just hope they all remember how much it cost.
Comrade Luke
@DougJ:
Bribery costs fewer lives…and it’s cheaper!
Comrade Luke
Triple jinx :)
El Cid
I remember that a big part of selling THE SURGE was suggesting it was needed to prevent sectarian (“ethnic”) cleansing. It’s hard to make a case for that when it began, as Cole notes, just as Baghdad and other areas were successfully ethnoreligiously cleansed, neighborhood by neighborhood, as the SURGE began. And which reinforced the cleansing by walling off the then-cleansed neighborhoods.
My worry about SURGE fantasies is that it is used to give the notion that ‘now we know’ how to do these invasions and occupations correctly. So, you know, the next time, we can avoid any suggestion that some invasion or state-destroying bombing campaign would unleash uncontrollable chaos, because, you know, THE SURGE PROVED that we have a strategy to deal with these sorts of after-effects.
Ana Gama
The surge was supposed to create a space – breathing room – for political reconciliation between the factions. Has that happened? It’s almost six months after the elections, and still no seated government in Baghdad. Some success that surge was…
El Cid
O/T: Palinbaggers take Alaska.
El Cid
Of course, in my view THE SURGE was primarily a domestic propaganda program intended to destroy any push to end the US occupation given the 2006 election results, and it succeeded far beyond those goals, bringing the ideological class swooning behind the notion that our new strategery had finally fixed Iraq.
Church Lady
Isn’t the Obama Administration pretty much following the exact same game plan now? Aren’t they bribing Afghan war lords? Didn’t we recently send an additional 30K troops (a/k/a a surge) into Afghanistan? Isn’t the architect of the surge in Iraq now directing a very similar operation in Afghanistan?
It would be great if you could please explain why a surge in Iraq was such a mistake, but a similar one in Afghanistan is the appropriate course of action. The only difference I see is the party of the President directing it.
Yutsano
@El Cid: And it just keeps getting bettah:
If they knock Castle out for a teabagger the Reps can kiss the Senate good-bye. No way do they earn enough seats to even come close.
Midnight Marauder
That’s the foundation for your counter-narrative right there. Just call it out and acknowledge their shameless revisionism for what it is. When they keep yelling and pontificating, just keep asking “why we were even there in the first place? Why was there even a need for something like The Surge to exist?” Every response, every question, every utterance should have the framing of “Why were we ever led into this quagmire to begin with?”
Make them own the fact that they brought this disaster upon us.
pattonbt
Well its simple really….
These people know the war was wrong at every level and that they were in full-throated gung-ho bandwagon support from jump street about how right it would be (thus being monumentally, catastrophically wrong). So their choices are…
1) Admit catastrophic error in judgement. Show sincere contrition. Undergo open and honest personal reflection on their core beliefs. Change said core beliefs. Move forward challenging the agendas of those who ever pushed such agendas. Of course what good is a pundit who is so wrong. So choice 2….
2) Find anyway possible to exonerate themselves and their actions via scapegoats so that they can deflect blame and thus pass on taking responsibility for their beliefs and actions, and keep their beliefs and actions as they were so they can keep getting their nice fat salaries.
I wonder which way they will go with that………..
MattR
@El Cid: At the very least, I am glad that “bagger” has replaced “gate” as the suffix of the month.
Martin
@hilzoy: They don’t care. If they cared, they never would have started the fucking thing.
Steve
@Church Lady: That’s the only difference you see between Iraq and Afghanistan? Really? Nice to know you’ve thought so deeply about the strategy.
fasteddie9318
This is fantastic. I can expect a Bush mythology-creation movement akin to the one they’ve been running about Reagan for the last 30 years. However much bullshit needs to be shoveled to make those two dirtbag failures seem like glorious leaders in a completely fabricated hindsight will be shoveled by the usual suspects. Meanwhile, Democrats will continue to do nothing but bitch about the presidents they manage to get elected.
Two things caused the violence to go down: we started paying people not to fight, and most of the real killing had already taken place by the time we surged ourselves in there. You know what another word for “surge” in this situation is? Reinforcements. But “reinforcements” makes it sound like the original mission was faltering, while “surge” sounds like something manly that Jonah Goldberg does into a tubesock after 3 or 4 bags of Cheetos and a few glimpses of Mann Coulter’s Adam’s apple.
Silver
Who the fuck cares if “The Surge” worked?
If I contract full blown cancer, I don’t need the fucking oncologist to tell me that, “Sure, the chemo didn’t work, but the penicillin cleared up that minor throat infection! Aren’t I the best?”
You still die.
Midnight Marauder
@Church Lady:
Silver
@Church Lady:
Well, you stupid cunt, it’s a horrible idea, actually. And it’s going to be Obama’s lasting historical failure.
Thanks for showing up.
Mnemosyne
@Church Lady:
Most people here think it was stupid for Obama to double down in Afghanistan — expected, because he campaigned on it, but stupid. To me, Obama’s appointing Petraeus to try and clean up McChrystal’s mess was an acknowledgment that it’s not working, but YMMV.
The surge didn’t work in Iraq, and it’s not working in Afghanistan. No dissonance.
Lexington
The surge did what it was intended to do – it lowered the violence in Iraq to the point that American leaders, both civilian and military, could claim a face saving “victory”.
Unfortunately, that result was achieved by plying the various Iraqi factions with lots and lots of guns and money, all the better to settle scores later. In terms of actually contributing to achieving American war aims, I think events will eventually show that the surge undermined rather than aided them. The surge has not resolved the key question that still hangs over Iraq: how will power be distributed between the country’s various factions? That question will probably only be resolved after considerable violence, and when that happens the surge will look like a much more modest “accomplishment”.
Of course, what happens in Iraq in 6 months, or a year, or 5 years is of absolutely no interest to American leaders. All they asked for, and what they got, was the opportunity to kick the can a bit further down the road so they could save their own reputations by claiming that they had “won” in Iraq before they lost.
Yutsano
@Church Lady: Where to begin, where to begin…
No.
Unless you’re intentionally conflating CIA and military mission objectives, no. We are not running a Sons of Afghanistan program.
I find it very disturbing you can’t see the difference between a surge and an adequate troop staffing level. And truth be told even that 30,000 troop increase ain’t enough for the job.
Newsflash: the 30,000 troop build-up was started and asked for under his predecessor. But feel free to polish his knob some more.
In the immortal words of the great sage Yoda, “That is why you fail.” Afghanistan and Iraq are not analogous situations. Your attempt to make them so doesn’t change the reality.
Mike Kay (Team America)
x
fasteddie9318
So, wait, is Church Lady a winger trying to expose all us hypocrite lefties for not kissing Bush’s ass for whatever good thing he was supposed to have done, or one of those increasingly irritating “pox on both houses” tools?
Yutsano
@Mnemosyne:
Yep, pretty much. As soon as Petreaus got the job I knew it was gonna be the start of the end in Afghanistan. I’ve met Petraeus, he’s very smart and nice to a fault. Of course you don’t get stars without leaving a bloody trail in your wake (I’m not talking combat deaths here) but he’s also a moral human in the end. I think he wants time to finally do the mission his own way, but if Obama ordered him to unwind the war tomorrow he’d find the safest way to do it. Kinda falls under that YMMV category I think.
DougJ
@Church Lady:
Believe it or not, I’m in the opposite place from what you describe. I think the bribery and targeted assassinations did work reasonably well in Iraq from 2006 onward and I think they’re not working very well in Afghanistan.
I could be wrong, it could all be ethnic cleansing that caused the decrease in violence in Iraq. But I think bribing more was probably a good idea.
I’m not sure how similar the situations are, between Iraq and Afghanistan.
EDIT: I guess what I’d say is that it sounds as though a more pragmatic strategy — bribe people, even if they’re Al Qaeda, if they’re honest enough to stay bribed, kill the people who won’t stay bribed, etc. — was adopted in Iraq and that that strategy may have been successful insofar as Iraq now isn’t a larger-scale Bosnia. But I don’t think Afghanistan will go the genocidal civil war route anyway, so we should just leave.
Suffern ACE
@El Cid: Those Surge fantasies are going to be a problem. We won’t even have invasions any more. Just surges.
Lolis
@Silver:
Calling someone a stupid c#nt is really really annoying. Get some fucking manners.
And Another Thing...
@Lolis: Word.
freelancer
@And Another Thing…:
Yes.
Scamp Dog
If you’re interested in the objective outcome, the surge was a failure: no political reconciliation, ethnic cleansing completed, etc.
The surge did “work” inside the beltway, because it shut down the debate about pulling out, and we got to stay until a Democrat got elected. Now we can blame those dirty hippie pacifist wimps for losing the war. Mission accomplished!
General Stuck
@El Cid: You know, the irony of it all is almost too much to bear these days. Here we have Alaska, prolly the biggest recipient of “other peoples tax dollars” state in the country with rabid anti government tea baggers getting one of their own nominated. The next sign we see may be “Get Massachusetts Hands Off My Welfare”
fasteddie9318
@DougJ:
I tend to think that the bribery wouldn’t have been able to work if the ethnic cleansing hadn’t already burnt through the worst of the tensions.
Yutsano
@DougJ:
They might as well be on two different planets. Iraq and Afghanistan share one important similarity: they both were more or less imperial detritus left over from the British. But Iraq has basically one language, and the major differences in the population are sectarian rather than tribal. Afghanistan is a loose wild confederation of tribal and linguistic clashes that have fought and traded with each other for thousands of years but have never developed a sense of national identity as Afghans. I’m barely scratching the surface and I could go on for hours, but there’s one huge glaring difference right there.
@Lolis: Agreed and seconded.
DougJ
@fasteddie9318:
That’s probably true too.
MattR
@Yutsano: C’mon. They are brown and mooslim. The rest is just minor details.
Steeplejack
Just got home from work and am too irate to read all the comments, so forgive me if I echo someone above.
I have said this before, I think at least once here at Balloon Juice: the surge worked, to the extent that it did (and I remain agnostic), not because it was a stroke of Wile E. Coyote super genius but because it consisted of doing what we should have done in Iraq in the first place–go in with sufficient manpower, matériel and planning to do the job.
Your basement is flooding, so you call a plumber. Some dude comes over to take a look, but he doesn’t have a pump, he doesn’t really have any tools to speak of, and he’s pretty much clueless about what he’s doing. So then you call Surge Brothers Plumbing, and they actually show up with everything they need, they actually know what they’re doing, and they get stuff done. Are they geniuses? No, they’re just good plumbers, doing what you would expect from good plumbers. The fact that they were preceded by complete idiocy does not make them better than they are. And the fact that the surge in Iraq was preceded by near-complete idiocy does not make it some ZOMG! instant classic of military genius.
Pointless aside: I hope everyone remembers what a complete douchebag Rumsfeld was. Where is he now?
Yutsano
@MattR: Heh. I dare you to go to downtown Tehran and scream they’re all a bunch of dirty Arabs. Then count the number of pieces you get torn into. I get first dibs on your right pinkie.
@Steeplejack: I think he got a gig at a think tank, but he hasn’t said much lately. I think he’s afraid Gates will decide he looks tasty, plus nothing makes a fool look foolish like a competent replacement.
Bob Loblaw
@Yutsano:
Wow.
D’ya hear that gang? The first two escalations didn’t take! We CLEARLY require a third one. That’s the ticket. Pay no attention to the huge loss of American lives in the last eight months since the Greatest and Most Brilliant Strategy Review Session in the History of Forever, those are just statistics. Just because Obama’s gotten more Americans killed in his first year and a half than his good-for-nothing predecessor managed in seven, for absolutely no improvements in security in return, (and since the Taliban are stronger geographically than they’ve been since 2001, that’s not a hard case for me to make) doesn’t mean anything. In fact, anybody who would dare to suggest the utter counterproductivity of the escalations as a root and branch cause of Taliban recruitment strength is clearly a fucking loon who wants to abolish the Pentagon. Because Obama is good and right and pure, see? Bummer for the twenty guys who got blown up real good over the last four days, their sacrifice in our grand pissing match with Pakistan over the future of the client state will be noted dearly.
fasteddie9318
@Steeplejack:
It gets even worse when you realize that a lot of the success that the Surge Bros seem to have had was because by the time they got there most of the visible water had seeped from your basement into the foundations of your house, and that at some point after they leave the house is either going to collapse or you’ll have to call in Crazy Mahmud’s Foundation Restoration company to shore things up.
BGinCHI
Someone please disabuse me of this idea:
A surge is successful because you flood an insecure area with security. If, for example, we really, really wanted to lower violence in Chicago, we could have a surge, which means that we would flood the areas of the greatest violence/tension with cops. We’d have to expend the resources, but once we did we’d provide a sudden disincentive for people to commit acts they’d normally get away with.
The point here is OF COURSE it works. But only so long as you can expend the resources. But what it doesn’t do is change the underlying causes of the violence (or religious strife, or drug wars, or whatever), so that once you undo it you go back where you started, or a worse version of that.
The surge has always seemed to me like taking over an MLB team and spending 2 billion dollars on payroll. You might win while you can afford it, but it ain’t sporting.
Lev
@Steeplejack: My girlfriend’s wingnut dad wants a Rumsfeld/Bolton ticket in 2008.
Steeplejack
@Steeplejack:
And another thing: “Bobo and various other neocons [. . .] on a crusade to get liberals to ‘admit that the surge worked'” is like your husband trying to convince you he’s a genius because he called Surge Brothers Plumbing–after he called the other guy who fucked things up even worse than they were to start with. Ngrr!
Silver
@Lolis:
You must have mistaken me for someone who wanted to be polite…
Steeplejack
@fasteddie9318:
Good point. I had to interrupt my rant to get my inhaler (and a big drink).
Steep + 1
MattR
@Yutsano: Yeah I know Persians are different from Arabs, but Persians are still brown and mooslim. (and of course at least half the people in this country don’t know the distinction)
suzanne
Even if the surge was the greatest bestest most-awesomest idea ever, all it did was un-fuck-up a great big fuck-up. Cleaning up your mess doesn’t get you a cookie.
BGinCHI
@Steeplejack:
Right on. I didn’t read your post before posting what I did above, but we’re on the same wavelength.
The only thing I’d add to yours is that it’s more like the plumbers came to fix your flawed but working pipes and refused to leave. They just keep “working” on them and your shit keeps floating to the top.
OK, we’re getting silly with the allegories…..
Steeplejack
@Lev:
God, his parallel universe is two or three iterations beyond even the standard wingnut parallel universe. Son, think long and hard before marrying into that family.
BGinCHI
@Lev:
Look, I don’t mind that John Bolton is married to Michael Bolton, but did he have to take his name?
Yutsano
@Lev:
Heh. We’re getting into Obama time machine bending alternate universe time lord territory here.
@suzanne:
Nope. Most kids usually rely on grandmas or being cute for that. Of course our mess is gonna cost us a wee bit more than flour, sugar, and vanilla.
@Bob Loblaw: Your logic fail is so bad this is all the response I’m dignifying you with.
Martin
@BGinCHI: Bad analogy. War isn’t sporting.
But you’re correct that in the end, what remains after the troops leave needs to be able to address the underlying problem. Unfortunately, Iraq has always been better able to meet this challenge. That’s everyone’s big worry in Afghanistan – is it a place that can be reasonably governed at this stage, and is there any possibility that Karzai’s government can do it? I think people are doubtful on the former and totally disbelieving of the latter – to a much greater degree than with Iraq.
JWL
“Yet no one could doubt President Bush’s support for our troops, or his love of country and commitment to our security”.
Barack Obama
August 2010
Cat Lady
Even if it’s stipulated that the surge did work, which I don’t, it worked for what end? Can someone explain to me, like I’m five years old, what the benefit to me, or any other American has been? Weren’t we fighting them over there so we wouldn’t have to fight them over here or some such shit, and now we’re picking fights with them here?
What a massive fucking clusterfuck.
Yutsano
@Cat Lady:
I officially declare this the epitaph of the Iraq War. Any objections?
@morzer: Firebaggers gotta get their poutrage on dude. After all they’re RIGHT!! Just ask them!
@fasteddie9318: You forgot your SHUT UP THAT’S WHY!!
morzer
@Bob Loblaw:
If using hallucinogenics, do not post in public.
Just sayin’.
Martin
@Cat Lady:
Nobody can. Hell, Obama didn’t even try to answer that, and he’s the fucking President.
fasteddie9318
@Cat Lady:
It worked because it was awesome, and because Freedom, and because 9/11, that’s why. WOLVERINES! also too.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@JWL: How dare he offer the faint praise of platitudes! He’s worse than Bush for saying next to nothing about Bush! Well, that’s it, I’m staying home in November!
Lev
@Steeplejack: He’s actually a nice guy, just one whose life hasn’t turned out the way he wants and who has projected that frustration onto his politics. That’s actually the case with nearly all the hate nuts I know.
BGinCHI
@Martin:
I obviously didn’t mean “sporting” in a flip way. I just meant to suggest that the surge games the system: it’s a false sense of security in a situation that does NOT merit it.
The country should have been more wary about going to war and should stay wary about the chance of long-term success. To say the least….
BGinCHI
@Cat Lady:
No five-year-old could ever be as stupid as Bush, but then again I’m not sure there are any 5-year-olds who love America as much as he does.
geg6
Fuck these mother fuckers and their fucking surge. Backward, forward, sideways, all the way to next Fourth of Fucking July.
Tell ya what, evil goddam assholes, I’ll give you the fucking stupid ass surge that was nothing but a political ploy as the greatest goddam military campaign in the history of the world the minute all you fuckers admit the whole Iraq fiasco was a mistake from the very start, that it would be a clusterfuck exponentially larger than the one in Iraq to attempt an attack of any sort, even by proxy, on Iran, and that the only proper diplomatic posture that is in America’s interests in the Israeli/Palestinian matter is to tell Israel to stop settlements, tear down the walls, and find a way to make peace, however uneasy, or we cut them off. And, sure, we can tell the Palestinians the same but it has no teeth since we don’t shovel large chunks of our treasury at them the way we do Israel. If the fucking neocons jump aboard this proposal, I’ll be the biggest surge cheerleader since John McCain.
Cat Lady
@BGinCHI:
If by love you mean destroy, then yeah.
Bob Loblaw
@morzer:
http://www.icasualties.org/OEF/ByMonth.aspx
It’s not hyperbole. More Americans have died from March 2009 (the first month following Obama escalation #1) to September 2010 (where we are now) than from the war’s beginning in 2001 to March 2009 (Bush policies). This is a factual statement.
The security gains are apparent to nobody, least of all those within military command.
TooManyJens
@JWL:
I sure as fuck could doubt all those things. Unless supporting the troops means sending them to die for no good reason, loving your country means pissing all over its core values, and commitment to security means letting our infrastructure rot while making more enemies abroad.
Fuck.
BGinCHI
This is probably why we are, as a country, so stupid:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/31/shrek-fish-asian-sheepshe_n_700679.html
Do people who watch The Today Show know there are books?
Maybe it would be better if they would use the show to ask Rummy how we could have a smaller footprint but then demand that a surge save our whole “strategy.”
Or, as geg says: fuck them.
Mark S.
@Yutsano:
God, if You make that happen, I will build several churches, synagogues, and/or mosques (whichever ones You like best!) in Your Honor.
Suffern ACE
@Cat Lady: O.K. if the “Fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here” isn’t working for you any more, will “I’m tired of swatting at flies” still work? If not “We are trying to prevent mushroom clouds cause only crazy Arabs would be crazy enough to use a nuclear bomb and forget that if they used one, we probably would drop dozens on them.” Any of those still work?
patrick II
If the republican assertion that surge worked because an infusion of troops was needed to turn the Iraq war around, why didn’t Bush and co. try it until five years of warfare had passed? It seems that people forget that Bush, Cheney and especially Rumsfeld insisted the number of troops we originally sent there were sufficient. People other than that small band at the top of the Bush administration and supporting neocons, including most of the army generals and especially General Shininski in congressional testimony, had been asking for more troops before the war even began.
Taking it as a given (which I know isn’t true for many here) that there was going to be a war, if republicans insist that an infusion of troops made the difference, are they also ready to say that their judgement about troop numbers was totally wrong for the first five years?
Suffern ACE
@patrick II: Oh, yes. I remember that now. The generals were too cautious (and their plans too costly) and needed to be taught some courage.
300baud
@TooManyJens:
I understand why people would doubt that Bush supported the troops, etc. But my take, especially after reading Speech-less, is that he really did, at least at the emotional level that Obama meant. I honestly don’t think that Bush is a particularly bad guy, which is why, e.g., he left office gracefully and has quietly retired.
I do, however, think he’s a deeply incurious dry drunk with the intellectual power of a used glow-stick, one who got thoroughly taken for a ride by a number of actually evil people, Dick Cheney among them. I think Bush’s true destiny, or at least his true level, was to be a mid-level client relations person for an oilfield supply company owned by a family friend. He would have been great at that. Instead, he’ll be known as one of America’s worst presidents.
Which in my view makes him a fool, but not a bad person. Unlike so many current Republican stars, who are both.
Anne Laurie
@fasteddie9318:
If Balloon Juice had an official NSA minder, it would be the Church Lady.
I say this every time the Church Lady pops up, not least because s/he goes batshite at the very idea of my insane termerity! ! !
Pseudonym
@Yutsano:
What do you mean?
Ed Zachary. Iraq is industrialized, urban, literate, flat, not landlocked, Arabic-speaking (vs Dari and Pashto), ethnically Arabic and Kurdish (rather than Pashtun and Tajik), economically structured around oil rather than opium… oh, and incidentally was not involved in the 9/11 attacks.
Yutsano
@Pseudonym: I’m being overly precise here, probably to a lot of folks’ confusion, so I apologize for that. However, the CIA and the military have divergent goals in Afghanistan, and sometimes those goals directly conflict, such as the CIA supporting warlords the military would prefer were either removed or marginalized. The layers of complexity go beyond just what our media is allowed to report to us.
mb
Wanting credit for the surge is like asking for credit for putting a tourniquet on a guy who’s hand you just cut off. Whether it worked or not, “whoopee for you and thanks for the severed arm!”
It may or may not have been the cause of the slowdown in violence (I lean toward not) but it sure didn’t result in an Iraqi Gov’t. That was the strategic purpose of the surge and on that basis it was a failure.
That being said, I’m perfectly happy to give all the credit for the surge to Geo. W. and his minions. You have to admire their consistency. To continue to fail 2 years after leaving office is a real feat.
Church Lady
@Anne Laurie: No, I just think that, at heart, you seem to share many of the traits of a “mean girl”. Bitchiness probably being first and foremost.
Xenos
Let’s try to remember the details here!
Why should George W. Bush get credit for The Surge? It was a policy forced on him after his manifest incompetence cost his party hugely in 2006. He was taken to the woodshed by his father’s advisors, had to fire his Secretary of Defense, and need a gimmick to regain face.
After years of Democrats criticizing his refusal to put enough boots on the ground to contain the violence, Bush turns around and makes a strategically insignificant reinforcement to an area that was stable, if still hostile, and proceeds to bribe it into a placid state. As far as it went, it worked, but that does not change the fact that, at the time, The Surge was a huge concession of his errors to date, and a vindication of people like John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and the entire non-Neocon wing of the Republican Party.
My favorite detail was that he sped up the the arrival of the reinforcements in Baghdad so he could go on TV and crow about it the very night that Congress was sworn in and Pelosi took control. Like every other significant detail of the war effort, it was manipulated and managed for political effect – a profound and truly scandalous betrayal of our soldiers.
Resident Firebagger
We’re now reasonably sure we’ll be getting a steady supply of oil.
So we’re leaving.
Someone Else's Blue Dart
I’m sorry – just catching up. Wasn’t the surge Ronald Reagan’s idea?
Michael
Remember this – the most important thing in the world to a Conservative is his feeeeeeelings (say it with that Limbaugh sneer). He must have constant affirmation that his preferred idiot policies work regardless of the extent of the failure of same, and will become violent when anybody points out gross incompetence, corruption, hypocrisy or just the general fucked-uptedness of what it was that he did or supported.
Lit3Bolt
I have a good analogy for surge/Iraq War apologists.
Let’s say George W. Bush left a massive shit, say, around the middle of the Middle East. He then made an Parisian chocolate mousse dessert out of that pile of shit. Bill Kristol, Bobo, et al. think this shit tastes great and absolves Bush for shitting all over the Middle East in the first place.
Moral: If you don’t like to eat shit, you hate freedom.
Michael
*chortle*
This one is OT.
http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2010/08/31/actor-john-cusack-calls-satanic-death-fox-news-gop-leaders/
Cusack must have been about +8 for that one, but one certainly does empathize.
Here’s the money shot, though:
Really? REALLY?!?!?
Whodathunk that hyperbolic accusations could possibly inspire unhinged people to do bad shit? Next thing you know, Fox News could inspire somebody to murder an OBGYN, or light up construction equipment around a new mosque, or cause people to fire on random Muslims at worship.
Frank
If I hear one more time that the surge worked, I think I’m going to scream. The surge had absolutely nothing to do with anything. Instead, what Petraeus did was to pay money to our enemies not fight.
Furthermore, if these people who were for the war and are so wrongly convinced that the surge worked, why don’t THEY pay for it then? It is $750 billion and counting. I want my money back!
Nick
Whether the surge “worked” or not is sorta irrelevant, we never should’ve been there in the first place. So if they’re trying to repair the image of themselves, Bush and neoconservatives, they’d best start defending the decision to actually go to war.
brantl
Having bribed and armed these people to go on a “policing mission” of Iraq can’t possibly be judged as a success until the prop of the bribes is removed and you see whether these guys leave the herd again or not. They don’t know if the surge worked.
It’s like when they say “Charlie Wilson’s war worked” and ignore that the modern mujihadeen emerged from it, to our constant consternation.
I could have said this shorter, without the evidence: They’re talking out of their asses.
kay
@Michael:
Agreed. It is unbelievable to me how everything is about them.
The President gives a 20 minute speech on Iraq and all conservatives are listening for is some mention of them.
Validation! We were right! The President ignored us! Meeeee!
Media indulges them, and all conservative commentary and fully half of all liberal commentary is a meditation on the “conservative soul”.
They completely dominate the discussion.
It’s like being in a room with a spoiled 5 year old. No wonder no one in this country can complete a thought or a sentence. They never shut up.
El Cid
@Frank: BUT YOU MUST ADMIT THAT THE SURGE IS WORKING. WHY WILL YOU NOT ADMIT THAT THE SURGE IS WORKING? WEREN’T YOU WRONG IN NOT BACKING THE SURGE?
[And, time machine, OFF!]
El Cid
@kay: One of right wingers’ biggest complaints is how libruls are so touchy-feely and this is a big reason why they can’t take the hard, tough, gutsy decisions Amurka needs. And also, they never get heard, the medja is totes dominated by the CommieLibs, and that’s why they need FOXNOOZ and a few talk radio shows.
Nick
@El Cid:
I will admit that the surge bought enough time for us to buy enough friends in the country to make it seem like its working, but I still believe we should have left then, in 2007, before it cost more American lives, and I still stand by my original opinion, which is we wouldn’t even be having this debate if we did the right thing and stay the fuck out of there in the first place.
kay
@El Cid:
I watched the speech and Paul Wolfowitz was really not front and center in my concerns.
Jesus. It’s self-regard and self-importance bordering on mental illness. “Meeeeee!”
I think Obama is just about where most Americans are on Iraq: resigned to what it is, chastened, and reckoning with the aftermath. It’s going to be difficult to do that over the incessant conservative screeching, but I think they’re get there.
Oh, and about reality: here’s how neoconservatives sold that war, in the former President’s own words:
El Cid
@Nick: I will admit that the SURGE did run operations more competently and less corruptly and a bit more sanely, but would have meant zip in both policy and propaganda if it had not begun at the successful conclusion of Iraq’s ethnoreligious cleansing (in the guise of preventing such), and had it not involved something which if Democrats had done they would have been called traitors even more loudly and uniformly than typically — the paying off of those killing US troops.
However, I did actually think that it was an operation to provide propaganda cover to exit the occupation, and it certainly was, I just imagined a quicker timetable so as to assist Republican electoral wins.
Nick
@kay: This is why I don’t think Democrats will ever be able to sustain a majority coalition government, ever…because all the Democratic Party is is a coalition of 100 million self-absorbed people who want personal gratification and will not vote if they don’t get it, dammit!
El Cid
Similar perspective:
Frank
@El Cid:
As I like to tell wingers; whatever. Can I now get my hard earned tax money back since I was against this moronic war from the very beginning? It is your war, you pay for it. Or did they really think it was free?
kay
@El Cid:
I love the tut-tutting from the press, too. “Why did he give this speech? Everyone knows he’s puling troops out”
If “everyone knows” it wouldn’t be because the US press covered it. I think they’re ashamed of their role in the massive lie and would really rather not talk about it.
They should be thankful he’s not exploiting it politically. Americans might revisit how the media got played each step of the way.
El Cid
@Frank: This will not work. I have tried it too. Now it’s ‘well maybe we shouldn’t have done it but we’d have had Victory II sooner if the Demotraitors hadn’t undermined the war effort, and that’s what cost us all the extra money, and plus with the way they and ACORN and all the blacks with the free houses and the taxes and the deficit broke the economy we can’t afford to pay it back.’
kay
@Nick:
I was talking about Republicans, actually, more specifically, conservatives.
Is there a political ideology that has been more thoroughly explored than “conservatism”, in the history of the universe?
I’m to the point where I’d define “conservatism” as “the people who talk about themselves”.
Their thoughts. Their feelings. Their search for a coherent philosophy. Enough already. I’m a liberal and can rattle off the 15 variants of conservatism.
Media talk about conservatives, conservatives talk about conservatives, and liberals talk about conservatives.
Frank
@El Cid:
Oh but it does silence them quite a bit. For example, they love to talk about how money doesn’t grow on trees and that we can’t afford health care reform. Well, I paid for their completely unnecessary war in Iraq. The least they can do is help pay for everybody’s health here in the United States.
kay
@Nick:
This is where he lost them. OUR combat mission and WE face and OUR nation. They knew right then it wasn’t going to yet another exposition on Conservative Theory.
Remember November
The whole point of Teh Surge was to do what should have been done in the first place, and not run a War on 5$ a day liek Rumsfeld wanted- leaving room open for no bid contractor cronies to rifle and pillage the country ( which they did anyway).
Don
Dear neocons and Bush cheerleaders,
Now that I have entered the house you insisted on building on a swamp, navigated past the improperly installed fixtures and wobbling ceiling fans, climbed the stairs constructed without a plan and which end a half-foot short of the top landing, looked out the window with no glass and gave myself splinters on the sill which was never sanded and sealed… yes, I concede that is a lovely swing on the back porch.
yours,
Everyone left in reality.
ps – Noticed the railing it’s bolted to is listing a bit. Might want to look into that.
John PM
I am late to the party (but I brought Boone’s Farm, so let’s SURGE the party!), but I have to comment on Church Lady calling Annie Laurie a mean girl – whaaaaaatttt??? Yet Church Lady says nothing about the commentor who called her a c-nt? Get your priorities straight.
Svensker
@Mike Kay (Team America):
A thousand times, this.
Frank
@Church Lady:
No. The “surge” in Iraq was a complete waste of money on a war that shouldn’t have happened in the first place. Think about it. We are laying off firemen, police, teachers etc here in the U.S. because we supposedly don’t have money to pay their salaries. And now we are hearing from Republicans that we can’t afford health care reform for all Americans.
Yet, somehow, we found money to pay to bribe Iraqi warring factions not to fight us. And these are warring factions that never had plans to attack us in the first place. How much more can our priorities as a nation possibly be screwed up?
Svensker
@fasteddie9318:
Hahaha. Well, actually, it’s not funny, but I laughed anyway.
Svensker
@Frank:
I got this from one of my wingnut rellies the other day:
Little-known fact: Obama’s failed stimulus program cost more than the Iraq war | Washington Examiner
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com
Expect to hear a lot about how much the Iraq war cost in the days ahead from Democrats worried about voter wrath against their unprecedented spending excesses. The meme is simple: The economy is in a shambles because of Bush’s economic policies and his war in Iraq….
So, money spent on Iraq DOESN’T COUNT because Obama spent money, also too. Got ya, librul!
Frank
@Svensker:
Twisted, isn’t it?! Obama’s stimulus program goes to projects such as infrastructure HERE in the United States. The Iraq war money goes to well, Iraq. And these are the morons that keep yelling “Country first”. Which country is my question.
Nick
@Church Lady:
The war in Iraq was an unnecessary mistake, and as thus, not worth the money and lives we spent on the surge. We fucked the country up, we should’ve taken the repercussions of it.
The war in Afghanistan as not an unnecessary mistake. It is worth, or was worth anyway, the money and lives we spent.
There.
Mnemosyne
@TooManyJens:
You’re reacting way out of proportion to what Obama said, which was basically, “Well, George did his best, bless his heart.” With “bless his heart” holding its traditional meaning of DIAF.
I’m sorry, but there was zero chance that Obama was going to get on national TV and tell everyone that thousands of Americans died for nothing and the soldiers who went there were stupid for doing it.
Malron
The untold story of the so-called surge was the way huge concrete barriers were built to wall off entire neighborhoods to prevent sectarian mingling of any kind. Friends were walled off from each other and families were separated. I watched an independent documentary a few months back that followed one citizen who couldn’t even visit the grave of a family member because the cemetery was walled off in an area he was forbidden to enter.
Svensker
@Malron:
Welp, freedom isn’t free ya know. These Iraqi losers need to remember that.
D. Mason
@kay:
“Conservatives” sure seems to be your favorite topic.
ChrisB
100,000 now seems to be the accepted number of Iraqi dead, sometimes preceded by the words “at least.” A horrendous number to be sure but I wonder if it significantly understates the actual number of those killed.
I remember that one prominent organization (can’t remember which) was using that number only several years into the war.
And as for the neocon rehab, I was greeted this morning by Ari Fleisher and Dan Senor doing precisely that on Morning Joe (note to self – change the channel before falling asleep). What a way to start the day.
TooManyJens
@Mnemosyne: Well, my anger there is directed primarily at Bush, not Obama. (What can I say, I still have a hair trigger when it comes to that murderer.) I didn’t watch the address, but I am willing to accept your “bless his heart” interpretation.
Chris Dowd
Claiming the “surge worked” in Iraq because fewer Iraqis are now being murdered on a day to day basis than say 2007- is akin to a drunk driver plowing over a group of people on the sidewalk – turning around and doing it again- only this time hitting fewer people than were there before.
The indecency of these people is so monstrous it boggles my mind. How do these people explain themselves to their children?
Suffern Ace
@ChrisB: Yep. I got to watch John Bolton in the break room, though I didn’t listen to him. I’m happy he’s on TV and not in any position to do anything, just like I like the idea that Paul Wolfritz can write articles for the NYT but is no longer a civilian in control over any part of the defense department. They can rehabilitate themselves all they want, but I will continue to hate them for what they did.
I only wish that there wasn’t a chance that their “expert” would be heeded ever again by anyone who matters.
El Cid
The World Health Organization estimated 151,000 violent deaths in Iraq from March 2003 – June 2006. More since then.
El Cid
@Chris Dowd: I think it’s a bit like having a high death count from a gang war over turf, and just about the time that each gang has established what they viewed as their historic monopoly operating areas, you send in more police and declare that the police by tamping down on the remaining fighting stopped a serious gang war and prevented an even bigger one.
LongHairedWeirdo
Here’s what I think about the surge.
We conked a guy over the head who was complaining of severe stomach pain, swearing that an emergency appendectomy was necessary to save his life.
We took out his appendix the old fashioned way, none of this girly-man laparoscopic surgery stuff. And we left some surgical instruments in there.
In the meantime, the poor bastard was stuck on a low fat diet, which helped the real problem – his gall bladder.
The surge? That’s when we went in, removed the surgical instruments, and pointed to the healing scars and lack of surgical equipment as signs of improvement.
Did it work? Does the surgeon who removed the surgical tools deserve credit? Who the hell gives a damn? *We* caused the problem, the work we did resolving it doesn’t earn us any praise.
“Come on, admit the surge worked! Sure, we went in, killed at least tens of thousands of people, caused all kinds of suffering and grief, but *the surge* worked! Doesn’t that mean something? Sure, we caused boatloads upon boatloads of grief – but we might have *reduced* the grief, and that *has* to count for *something!*”
I’ll give the Bushies something: yes, it did what it was intended to do. It was another chance for Bush to seek praise for wise leadership after creating a terrible mess.
KevinNYC
The problem with discussing “if the surge worked” is the way the surge was sold to the American and what worked were too completely different things.
Things that worked.
A. A shift in military tactics away from the sledgehammer approach to counterinsurgency.
B. The Sunnis turned on Al-Qaeda.
C. We recognized B and gave it a way to become a sustainable organization by throwing money at it.
D. Al-Sadr took his RPGs and went home. (Like the Iraq Army in Mar 2003, he lost a few battles but is unconquered. I think the Battle of Basra told him, he couldn’t openly hold territory, but we will hear from him again.)
E. The Shiites won the civil war.
It’s hard to find any of that in the arguments for the surge. I did find this in Bush speech on the surge
But victory in Iraq will bring something new in the Arab world – a functioning democracy that polices its territory, upholds the rule of law, respects fundamental human liberties, and answers to its people. A democratic Iraq will not be perfect. But it will be a country that fights terrorists instead of harboring them – and it will help bring a future of peace and security for our children and grandchildren.
I’ll chalk that up to a remains to be seen.