Pancake City

The original justification for the surge, the addition of 30,000 combat troops to Iraq last spring and summer, was to to reduce violence to a low enough level so that political progress could be made in the Iraqi legislature. In addition, tactics were changed to create a temporary reprise from violence, such as paying and assisting the Sunni Awakening forces to kill extremists rather than the U.S. military and rival Shiite:

The predominantly Sunni Awakening forces, referred to by the U.S. military as the Sons of Iraq or Concerned Local Citizens, are made up mostly of former insurgents who have turned against extremists because of their harsh tactics and interpretation of Islam. The U.S. military pays many fighters roughly $10 a day to guard and patrol their areas. Thousands more unpaid volunteers have joined out of tribal and regional fealties.  (link)

Nine months later, here is where we stand. The troop surge and fragile alliances formed with our former enemies worked in reducing violence in Iraq. But political progress, such as accepting Sunnis into Shiite-dominated government institutions such as the army, has been almost non-existent. I don’t know even half the factors that are making political progress so slow, but it’s not happening, and I don’t get a sense that it’s on the horizon or the Bush administration even knows how to bring political progress about.

By the original definition for success, the surge hasn’t worked yet because of the lack of political progress in Iraq. Some people have pointed this out, but I think critics have already lost this battle.

To the public, the problem in Iraq wasn’t that the Shiite,  Sunnis, and Kurds weren’t making progress forming a unity government. It was that every day in the newspaper or local news there was another story of a suicide bomber killing dozens of Iraqis in a market or American soldiers getting wounded or slaughtered in an ambush.

That’s why it intuitively makes sense to people that the surge worked. There were daily headlines of troops getting killed in Iraq. More troops were sent, temporary cease-fires were made, and the headlines moved off the front pages. You have the President and McCain claim that the surge worked, and it makes sense, even if only a worrisome amount of progress was made towards the original goal of political reconciliation.

I think critics of the Iraq war need to stop arguing that the surge didn’t work. It’s a losing argument and focused on the past. The fact that it’s a true argument is besides the point. Critics need to focus on the important issue at hand: political progress. What progress has been made? Why hasn’t more progress been made? What are the obstacles to meeting the benchmarks the Bush administration laid out years ago, few of which have been met? What is the plan to get the Iraqis to meet those benchmarks?

My sense at the moment is that we don’t have a good plan to force the different power players to negotiate with each other. There may not even be anything we can do. Our presence there may even be the problem, as the Iraqi people may resent being occupied and the Iraqi leadership may not feel any presure to do the tough work of negotiating with each other. I use “may” because I don’t have a clue. But these are all questions that haven’t been asked or answered by both Democrats and Republicans. In their place, we have the same simplistic arguments we’ve had before: the war was a good idea / the war was a mistake. The surge worked /the surge failed. It’s time we move on and start to ask the right questions.