Just What Did the "Surge" in Iraq Do?

[IndianaGreen]

Just What Did the "Surge" in Iraq Do?

By Joel Wendland

The surge of 30,00 US troops from January 2007 to June 2007 caused the decline in violence in Iraq. At least that's the commonly-held wisdom. John McCain thought the surge was so successful, he even went so far as to suggest that the surge in troops was his idea.

In making this claim, however, McCain fudged the timeline on when the surge began. He claimed that the so-called "awakening councils," the US military-funded militia groups in western Iraq who took pay and weapons in exchange for dropping their opposition to the occupation, came into existence as part of the surge in January of 2007. Actually, the "awakening councils" were an ad hoc exercise put together months prior to the surge.

During an interview with CBS, which the network inexplicably scrubbed from the aired program and subsequently admitted to doing so, McCain said, the surge "began the Anbar awakening. I mean, that's just a matter of history."

McCain's confusion about the actual history of the awakening councils was so egregious, it prompted Ilan Goldenburg, policy director of the National Security Network, to question McCain's qualifications for president. He said, "It is so appalling and so factually wrong that I'm actually sitting here wondering who McCain's advisers are. This isn't some gaffe where he talks about the Iraq-Pakistan border. It's a real misunderstanding of what has happened in Iraq over the past year."

If the surge of troops in in 2007 had no impact on the changing security situation in western Iraq, what about in Baghdad itself, the location of at least a quarter of Iraq's population?

At the time the surge took place, some reports by human rights organiations, which Political Affairs reported on, indicated that forced population movements, commonly described as ethnic cleansing, played a large role in the gradual reduction of violence through 2007.

In other words, international aid organizations suspected that inter-ethnic conflict was reduced only after huge numbers of Sunnis in Baghdad were forced to leave their homes and businesses.

http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/7436/

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1. You mean "the splurge?"

[bemildred]

2. Show biz, a dog and pony show, that's all it ever was.

It's only purpose was to support a domestic (USA) public relations offensive, which is really all the people who run out government know how to do anymore. This is not to say it had no effects, but it was never about the eventual outcome of the situation on the ground in Iraq. That is still going to be civil war, balkanization, and hatred of the USA.