General Petraeus Confirms The Surge Has Failed

The greatest lie foisted by the Bush administration upon the American public since the start of the Iraq war is that the surge is a success. During his testimony before Congress this week, General Petraeus confirmed the failure that the compliant conservative media has refused to admit.

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and Crocker, the top U.S. diplomat, described progress as fragile and reversible. They asked for patience and a suspension of troop withdrawals that will leave 10,000 more American soldiers in Iraq through the end of the Bush presidency than before the surge of 30,000 was announced more than a year ago.

They will not be removing all of the additional troops by this summer, but will be leaving one third of them in country. Apparently the surge has not produced the stability that the administration wants us to think it has.

Perhaps the most appalling comment General Petraeus made was not specifically about the surge, but about the overall disaster that the war has been.

Warner of Virginia pressed Petraeus to answer whether the war has made the United States more secure.

"I've thought more than a bit about that, senator, since September," Petraeus replied, referring to the last time he testified before the congressional committees. The question is "perhaps best answered by folks with a broader view and ultimately will have to be answered by history."

The top commander of the war in Iraq can't tell us that it has made us more secure. Instead, he has decided to follow Bush down the path of dubious waffling and declare that only "history" will determine if the hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives have been well spent. Perhaps the follow-up question should have been, "Then what the hell are we doing there?"

Petraeus also said, as quoted in the Daily News:

We haven't turned any corners, we haven't seen any lights at the end of the tunnel. The champagne bottle has been pushed to the back of the refrigerator. And the progress, while real, is fragile and is reversible.

Five years. Five long years since the toppling of Saddam's regime. How close are we to any sort of end to the occupation? We can't even see the light at the end of the tunnel. The surge has been declared a success by the conservative media and yet "we haven't turned any corners."

So what now? Staying the course has failed. Surging the troops has failed. It's time to come up with a concrete plan for withdrawal.

The Failure Of The Surge

[Editor's Note: Though this post is dated April 1, it was actually posted on April 5. Blogger is using the date that I saved the first draft. Sorry for any inconvenience that may cause.]

Over the past couple of months, the Bush administration and pundits in the conservative media have been beating us all over the head with the insistence that Bush's "surge" strategy has succeeded. John McCain has predictably taken the opportunity to point out that he supported the surge strategy, and therefore he's the best qualified to be president. Amid this fanfare, we should all take a moment to think about something that is going unmentioned, namely that the surge is not a success.

Bush's surge strategy has four elements:

1. Escalate troop levels in Baghdad.
2. Decrease sectarian violence.
3. Enable political reconciliation of warring factions.
4. Reduce troop deployments to pre-surge levels.

Point 1 has been accomplished. Point 2 has arguably been, as well, though I'm not sure that the causal link between 1 and 2 is as cut and dry as people in the conservative media and the Bush administration would have us think.

Point 3? Umm... No. Point 4? Also negative.

Therefore, at best, it is premature to declare the surge a success. The overall strategy will only be a success once all 4 elements have been a success. Calling the strategy victorious at this point is only going to set Bush up for another "mission accomplished" moment, once things fall to pieces again.

Speaking of that, the recent fighting between the Mahdi Army and the Iraqi security forces have shown us that not only has Bush's surge not succeeded, but it has, in fact, failed.

From the BBC:

The monthly figure of people killed in Iraq rose by 50% in March compared with the previous month, according to official government counts.

A total of 1,082 Iraqis, including 925 non-combatant civilians, were killed, up from 721 in February.

The Mahdi Army decided to ignore Muqtada al Sadr's cease-fire order and resist the assault of the Iraqi army to take control of Basra, resulting in a burst of violence from Sadr City in Baghdad to the southern tip of the country. The Iraqi army was unable to gain any ground against al Sadr's forces and had to resort to calling in US air strikes. After a long week, several members of Iraq's government traveled to Iran and met with al Sadr, a meeting mediated by the Iranians, and brokered a cease-fire.

From The Huffington Post:

The Iraqi government sent a three-member delegation that was headed by a prominent Shiite lawmaker close to al-Maliki, Ali Adeeb, and also included two of his Shiite colleagues, Hadi al-Amri and Qassem Sahlani, said the Iraqi official based in Tehran. The meetings in Qom also included representatives from Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards, he said.

If you recall, the Revolutionary Guard is the group that Congress last fall declared to be a terrorist organization.

Once al Sadr asserted his authority and instructed his followers to stand down, the level of violence fell back to the atrocious level it had been previous to the week's events.

I don't wish to diminish the role of the US troops who have been surged into the country, but it seems like the reduction in violence has a lot more to do with al Sadr's cease fire and the Sunni insurgent cease-fire (aka the "Awakening") than with the troop surge. If al Sadr were to declare an end to his cease-fire, there would be an explosion of violence across the southern half of Iraq, which, incidentally, is what people are preparing for.

The real question about part 3 of the surge strategy is what will happen after this fall's provincial elections. As Robert Dreyfuss at The Nation puts it:

Sadr's movement is positioned to register a massive win at the polls in Basra and throughout southern Iraq in provincial elections scheduled for October, an electoral defeat that would portend the end of the Dawa-ISCI regime.

So even if the Bush administration is able to successfully enact step 4 of the surge strategy and bring troops back to pre-surge levels, his strategy has failed.

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