John McCain is building his entire campaign around the “surge”, which he claims to have created himself, and which, according to him, has brought, or will bring, peace and prosperity to Iraq. In the process of promoting the “surge” he has misrepresented its origin, its purpose and its results. Juan Cole has an excellent post today about the surge, and delivers a decidedly negative appraisal.
As those with memories recall, the surge was supposed to supply a breathing space to allow for political reconciliation. It has been a failure on those terms, so McCain/Bush talk about reduced levels of violence. As Cole points out, there’s a reason for that reduced violence:
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.
One of those refugees, apparently, is the woman blogger at Baghdad Burning, whose last post is dated October, 2007, from Syria, to which country she fled just about the time that violence in Iraq began to decline. So it appears that the surge decreased levels of violence because it created a situation in which the people doing the killing had nobody left to kill. Just one more Bush success story.
Cole’s entire post is recommended reading. Cole actually knows what he’s talking about, which is one of the reasons so few people listen to him
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