Peter W. Galbraith: The Surge (dated March 15, 2007)

[babylonsister]

The Surge
By Peter W. Galbraith

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In devising his new strategy, Bush again turned to the neoconservatives. The so-called surge strategy is the brainchild of Frederick Kagan, a military historian at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute who has never been to Iraq. And once again, President Bush dismissed the views of his military advisers. General George Casey and General John Abizaid, the commanders in the field, doubted that additional troops would make any difference in Iraq. They were replaced by surge advocates, including Lieutenant General David Petraeus, now the top commander in Iraq.

Petraeus, on whom so much now rests, served two previous tours in Iraq. As the American commander in Mosul in 2003 and 2004, he earned adulatory press coverage—including a Newsweek cover story captioned "Can This Man Save Iraq?"—for taming the Sunni-majority city. Petraeus ignored warnings from America's Kurdish allies that he was appointing the wrong people to key positions in Mosul's local government and police. A few months after he left the city, the Petraeus-appointed local police commander defected to the insurgency while the Sunni Arab police handed their weapons and uniforms over en masse to the insurgents.{1} Neither this episode nor the evident failure of the training programs for the Iraqi army and police which he ran in his next assignment seemed to have damaged the general's reputation.

In view of the role of neoconservatives in producing the Iraq fiasco, Bush's continued reliance on them was, even more than the proverbial second marriage, the triumph of hope over experience. In so doing, Bush apparently, and uncharacteristically, swallowed his pride. In a Vanity Fair article released just before the mid-term elections, the main neoconservative proponents of the war, including the AEI's Richard Perle and David Frum, trashed Bush as an incompetent. Perle, a noted Washington defense hawk who was among the most vociferous advocates of the war, said that in retrospect, the invasion was a mistake. Frum, who wrote the most famous phrase of the Bush presidency, "the axis of evil," provided a comment that neatly encapsulated the President's governing style and the neo-conservatives' belief that ideas trump the practical:

I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me has been that, although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything.

In his speech and in interviews that followed, Bush said he would take responsibility for the mistakes made in the Iraq war. But when asked if he owed the Iraqi people an apology for not doing a better job of providing security after the invasion, he quickly deflected the responsibility to the Iraqis:

Well I don't, that we didn't do a better job or they didn't do a better job?... I think I am proud of the efforts we did. We liberated that country from a tyrant. I think the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude. That's the problem here in America. They wonder whether or not there is a gratitude level that's significant enough in Iraq.

Bush's obliviousness to his own failure contributed to the overwhelmingly negative public and congressional reaction to his plan. According to a Gallup poll taken immediately after the speech, 70 percent of Americans disapproved of Bush's handling of the Iraq war and his overall approval ratings fell to the lowest of his presidency. Aside from Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman, no Democrat supported the new Bush plan. At the Senate Foreign Relations Committee the day after the speech, Republican senators—and in particular those up for reelection in 2008—were among the fiercest critics as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice tried to defend the new strategy.

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http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19950