Old Ideas from Another Place

Two weeks ago, Newsweek put out a cute video entitled “The Decade in 7 Minutes,” condensing notable news events of the past 10 years into a seven-minute montage.

While most of the content is free of editorial comment, the program’s treatment of one event stands out. As the year 2007 begins, the narrator of the video intones, “The U.S. undertakes a surge of more troops in Iraq. Opponents say it won’t work. It does.”

To be sure, this statement summarizes the media consensus about the surge. “The surge, clearly, has worked, at least for now,” The New York Times’s Dexter Filkins pronounced in August 2008, in an ostensibly unbiased news article. That December, National Public Radio political correspondent Mara Liasson declared that, through the surge, President George W. Bush had “corrected his mistakes” in Iraq and that “he is handing over a war that’s pretty manageable, if not almost won, to his successor.” “The Decade in 7 Minutes” is not even Newsweek’s first time promoting the surge in a straight news item. An October article by Holly Bailey and Evan Thomas ’73 included opposition to the surge as a mark against Vice President Biden’s judgment, stating as fact that the policy “rescued the American effort from near defeat.”

However, the notion that the surge “worked” in any meaningful sense is wrong. More importantly, this misunderstanding of the surge risks pushing the Obama administration toward a dangerous and unnecessary escalation of the war in Afghanistan.

For one thing, the injection of over 20,000 new troops was only one of several factors that contributed to the decrease in violence in Iraq in 2006-07. The Anbar Awakening of 2006 proved arguably more important: Sunni tribal leaders began taking action against al-Qaeda elements in their region and formed alliances with American military units to that end. While American military strategy certainly helped this campaign along, the process was initiated by local Iraqis and occurred far before President Bush announced the surge or sent more troops to Iraq.

The prominent Shi’a cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s unilateral decision to freeze his militia in August 2007 was also critical. While Sadr’s motives are still unclear, the freeze held, ending violent clashes between Sadr’s forces and other Shi’a paramilitary groups. More morbidly, the success of Shi’a ethnic cleansing efforts in Baghdad left fewer Sunnis in the city with whom to spar and inspired the creation of defense barriers that prevented battles with those who remained. This is not to say, of course, that the troop increase did not play a role in decreasing violence in Iraq. But it is hard to argue that it played a definitive one. Indeed, most factors contributing to the decline were due to decisions made by the Iraqi people, not to American policy.

Even granting that the surge contributed somewhat to the drop in violence, it did not meaningfully help the American mission in Iraq. The actual security objective of the surge was to provide the security necessary for a political reconciliation that would prevent further ethnic conflict. By creating a reasonable level of safety, the theory went, the U.S. would enable Kurd, Sunni, and Shi’a leaders to take the risks necessary to carve out a lasting peace. This did not occur. Over a year after the initial troop increase, Baghdad was still in stalemate, and no further political compromise had been met. “Some slow, grudging political progress has been made,” Council on Foreign Relations expert Stephen Biddle ’81 told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April of 2008, but “the pace has lagged far behind the original intentions of the surge’s designers.”

More to the point, it is worth comparing the surge against its main alternative at the time of its implementation, namely a phased withdrawal. It is hard to imagine that either a quick redeployment, which liberals wanted, or a slower removal of forces as proposed by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group would have resulted in worse security outcomes for the United States than the surge produced. The Anbar Awakening, Sadr stand-down, and intra-Baghdad ethnic-violence exhaustion would have all likely occurred and reduced violence had the U.S. implemented one of these other strategies. Either would have greatly reduced the considerable human and economic toll of the war on the American military and taxpayers. The political situation in Iraq would have been, if anything, improved if the U.S. chose to leverage troop withdrawals to extract concessions from ethnic parties.

While remembering the surge accurately is critical for historical purposes, it is especially important in light of the ongoing debate over an escalation in Afghanistan. Those supporting the ramp-up have assumed that a troop increase would meaningfully contribute to a decrease in violence and thus to political rebuilding in that country. If the surge did not accomplish these goals in Iraq, miring ourselves further in Afghanistan will likely fail to provide the security gains that the strategy’s proponents promise.

Dylan R. Matthews ’12, a Crimson editorial writer, lives in Kirkland House. His columns appear on alternate Tuesdays.