Post hoc ergo propter hoc, the logical fallacy of presuming that because something happened after something else happened, it happened because of that something else. That involves a bit of hoodoo and voodoo, that the surge brought our troop presence to the magical level. 140,000 weren’t enough, but add another 30,000 and mirabile dictu! The magical level is acheived! and the ponies begin to rain down.
But what is the connection? Where is the evidence to say that these things only happened because of the “surge”? Where, conversely, is the evidence that they would not have happened otherwise? For that matter, where is the evidence that they would not have happened, and happened more quickly, if we were gone?
As I’m pretty sure you know, Sam, the alternative explanation is that ethnic cleansing has been largely accomplished, civilian deaths diminish because the number of available targes has diminished. You offer what evidence to suggest otherwise?
Would not similar results be expected if the alternative explanation is the more accurate one? Again, you are eager to interpret any positive trend as a result of the “surge”, but offer no reason to believe it beyond your insistence that it must be so.
Progress to what, Sam? What would success look like? Are we still talking about a federal Iraq, with a unified central government? Given the demographics, wouldn’t that pretty much have to be a Shia dominated state, with close ties to Iran?
What happened was al-Malilki tried to crush a poltical rival with the troops we have spent years and $billions “training”. It was a sorry spectacle, as I’m sure you know.
Why, thank you, Sam, yes, we will. But what brings in the “if you want” phrase? Do you think this is a matter of political preference, we only blame Bush because we want to? Who do you blame, Sam? Kerry? The dirty fucking hippies? Given that this strategy is the child of the same fuckups who initiated this debacle, you are suggesting that we should trust their judgement and wisdom? Why?
Anything is possible, Sam, such is the nature of things political. The question isn’t what is possible, the question is what is feasible, the question is how much we invest simply because something is “possible”. You are reluctant to offer us an answer, how many more Friedman Units before the Day of Jubilee?
So we’ve heard. Perhaps that is so, perhaps it is not. Outside of your instinctive reaction, what have you? Sez who, Sam? The people who have been wrong about everything so far are suddenly prescient and wise?
This is beneath you, Sam. If it isn’t, do work on that, won’t you?
Well, good, I guess. Very kind of you.
The classic phrasing is “light at the end of the tunnel” Its the same light as “on the horizon”. Things have improved from wretchedly awful to not very good. But again, who’s to say that this is the result of the “surge”? Had there been no “surge”, and the same events occurred, wouldn’t you be here telling us we should stay because…well, exactly the same thing you’ve just said. Simply because something occurred after a given event is not proof of causality.
And “crushing Al Queda”? You’ve got to be kidding. Do you want those same cites again, about how little significance AlQ has in Iraq? Please tell me you already know this.
Trust some of the people posting to emphasize the success of the surge read the news coming out of Iraq today. It appears all hell has broken lose. Again.
We were sold a cakewalk 6 years ago. This would be quick and cheap with practically no destruction. So 6 years down the line you are grasping at straws to say “see it is working”. No it is not. I could point out how many soldiers died last week which some critics use to say the surge is not working. But the end point has to be an Iraqi government which has the ability to lead and to exist in an unfriendly middle east. There is nothing to show that. The government has no respect. It provides no services or leadership. It is corrupt and most Iraqis see it as a puppet government of the US. The neighborhoods have broken down into feudal groups fighting for local control and hoping for more.
People running around the green zone with helmets and flack jackets may be progress to you,but it shows there is no place to hide anymore. As our costs go into the trillions you say we need more. Nope, it is just ugly and there is no victory of any kind in the foreseeable future. There is still no electricity and plumbing. The basic needs of the people are not being met. This questionable surge"victory" is meaningless until the millions who have fled their homes feel it is safe enough to come home. It is not close.
Now, just a second here! Did they check their ID? Did they show their genuine, honest to goodness AlQ membership card? Not some phoney-baloney wannabe “AlQ in Mesopotamia” crap, but the genuine article?
Six years. How much evidence that we are going no where do you require? It has been a waste of blood and treasure. We fought an insurgency until they suddenly were called Al Queda again. You never question. As many times as they have lied,as often as they fire any one who doesn’t follow the script and say it is going well, you never question. Some of us see years of mistakes and lies. The surge success is just another one. They lie over and over again.
Who are you talking to? I never question? Have you been engaged with someone else with my screen name in the past who argued dogmatically for the Bush administration? I can assure you that wasn’t me. What I am doing right now actually is questioning the accepted dogma that the Iraq war is simply unworkable, that there can never be a solution. Maybe there can, maybe I was wrong before when I assumed that it was just an intractable clusterfuck? Maybe I wasn’t, that remains to be seen, but I don’t think it’s quite as cut and dry as you would like to make it.
I guess this has to be repeated over and over again, but the ‘surge’ was NOT just about adding another 30,000 soldiers. Primarily, the surge was a change in tactics - a critical change in tactics. Before the surge, the U.S. had adopted a ‘run and gun’ strategy whereby soldiers would travel into an area, engage the enemy, then withdraw back to base. This was also called the ‘whack a mole’ strategy. The result was that the insurgents learned to fade away into the population, which was terrified to speak up against them because they knew that as soon as the U.S. soldiers left, the insurgents would come right back and kill anyone who helped.
For example, before the surge the U.S. and Iraqi government found it almost impossible to recruit police officers. After the surge, the number of applicants to the police forces increased dramatically, and the performance of various Iraqi police has been improving steadily.
The surge was a change in tactics - soldiers now go into an area and STAY there, protecting the population. The result is that the people feel more confident and start cooperating. Also, living within the population gives the soldiers the ability to spot things out of the ordinary and to form close ties with local leaders.
This change in tactics required more soldiers. Therefore, there was a ‘surge’.
The change in tactics was exactly what counter-insurgency experts had been calling for since the war started. It took Rumsfeld’s removal to make it happen, because he was the primary opposition to it.
Evidence that it would not have happened anyway? Other than the situation was deteriorating for several years without a change in tactics, then began to get dramatically better as soon as the change was made?
Yes, I am aware that correlation does not equal causation. But it can imply it, and this is a pretty strong correlation. As for the claim that this is Post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning, that is weakened substantially by the fact that this effect was predicted before it happened, and the causal mechanisms for it happening were described.
That explanation has never held water, except in Baghdad. The ‘Surge’ has been working across the country, including areas that still have large ethnic mixes. Do you have evidence that it was ethnic cleansing that causes the downturn in violence? And it was just lucky that the ethnic cleansing campaign was completed just as the surge started? And that violence in areas where it wasn’t completed continued unabated?
No, it wouldn’t. Again, if ‘ethnic cleansing’ was the reason, it should be pretty easy to do a study which looks at areas which were violent before, but which never did have a mix of Shiites and Sunnis, and see if they are still violent. Or you could look at areas that are still mixed, and see if they re still violent.
In Baghdad, there’s no question in my mind that some of the decrease in violence was due to ethnic cleansing having been completed. You’re right about that. But since then (Dec 2007), violence has continued to fall, even though ethnic cleansing is no longer going on.
Anbar province, which has seen the most dramatic gains, was always primarily Sunni (95%). And it still is. There have been reports of ethnic cleansing there in a couple of places, but the high levels of violence in the region was not primarily a sunni-shia clash in the first place. It was al-Qaida in Iraq. A big factor in the downturn in violence was the ‘Awakening Councils’, which turned against AQI and started working with Americans instead of against them.
In Ramadi, Sunnis actually fought to protect Shiites against AQI. From the Washington Post:
AQI had posted bulletins in Mosques demanding that the 3,000 Shiites in Ramadi (of 200,000 total citizens) leave or face execution. As a result, Sunnis in the city banded together to protect the Shiites.
For more background, you might like to read this photo-essay by Michael Totten: Anbar Awakens - Part 1. Totten has lived in the Middle East (Beirut), and has been embedded in Iraq several times. The photos are very interesting as well.
I think the best chance is for a federated Iraq - not a completely unified single state government. That seems to be pretty much what the people want. But there would still be a fairly strong central government and agreements and treaties which bind the people together. If you look at that survey from March I posted yesterday, the vast majority of Iraqis want Iraq to remain together.
As for shias being tightly aligned with Iran, I hope you know that not all shias want Iran involved in their affairs. The recent violence in shia areas, in fact, is between the Mahdi army, which has close ties to Iran, and groups which do not and which do not want those ties.
That’s how you see the current conflict with the Mahdi army? Or are you talking about something else?
The military fuck-ups from before were primarily the result of Rumsfeld and his refusal to adopt the military’s own counter-insurgency strategy, because it required more soldiers and he was trying to prove his theory that a modern lean army could take on the world. He was wrong, he was shitcanned, and people who know what they are doing were put in charge.
General Petraeus’s record in Iraq since the start of the war has been extremely good. Using the strategies he is using now, he was the only regional commander who got his areas primarily under control and peaceful after the war. But he conflicted with Rumsfeld’s ideas, and was removed from Iraq and sent home (and his region fell apart again under new command). Now he’s back and running the whole show, and getting the same results now that he was getting in his own region of Iraq four years ago.
Oh, those Friedman units are useful to bash any excuse for staying, aren’t they? And I know this isn’t going to be a satisfying answer, but you stay until conditions indicate you can leave without everything going to hell. Maybe it’ll take a dozen Friedman units. Maybe two. I don’t know. All I can say is so long as the trend lines are moving in the right direction, you stay on course. If things start falling apart again, and you can’t come up with a plan to fix it, then it’s time to cut and run.
If opinion against the occupation was rising rapidly, that would be another reason to leave. If there was evidence that the presence of Americans was part of the problem, that would be reason to leave. None of that is the case today. Opinion of the coalition has been improving since the surve. The number of Iraqis in opposition to it has been declining. U.S. casualties are way down. Given those statistics, it seems reasonable to press forward with the new strategy.
It’s a serious question. I would take seriously an argument for withdrawal based on a chain of logic which says that it’s the best course of action at this point for America and for Iraqis. Metrics like the ones I just mentioned above would be a good place to start. Show me evidence that five years from now the Middle East will be a better place if the U.S. withdraws today than it would be if the U.S. remains and tries to build a stable government.
But I just keep hearing, “the war is lost! Bush sucks! Get the troops out!” And the strong evidence that things may be turning around gets ignored. Not by everyone - a lot of people bitterly opposed to the war have accepted that the surge is having a positive effect and needs to be given a chance. The results of failure are just too drastic to not pay serious attention to any evidence that there may be a way out.
Not all good things happened because of the surge. The Sunnis began turning away from al-Qaida before the surge started. The Mahdi army’s cease-fire coincided with the surge, but I can’t say that the surge caused it. Nonethess, I’ve tried to read as many accounts as I could from all sides, and I’m satisfied that the surge is having a positive effect.
No, I don’t. Because the stuff I’m reading says the opposite - especially in Anbar and Baghdad. Go read the article on Ramadi. Let me quote from it:
Al-Qaeda in Iraq had previously been thought to have somewhere in the neighborhood of 1000-2000 fighters, and accounted for less than 10% of the violence as measured by number of attacks. But that doesn’t really indicate the effect they were having, because their attacks were often designed to catalysts in sparking more sunni-shia conflict. And 1000 terrorists who have serious backing are a huge deal - it only took 20 in the U.S. to cause 9-11. Al-Qaida attacks are often high-profile attacks on Sunnis or Shiites, carried out in ways that maximize sectarian tension. Whereas much of the other violence was a mix of opportunism, tribal conflict, revenge killings, criminal activity, and sectarian violence. So it’s hard to state with certainty the effect of al-Qaida on the overall stability in Iraq, which gives partisans on both sides ammunition to either inflate it or minimize it.
For my reading choice as the war started,I read 3 blogs by people who were actually living there. But they became more intermittent as the electricity and services decayed. But reading the fear of those who were experiencing it was far different from what Bush and his army of paid propagandists described. However the bloggers ran . Baghdad Burning writer fled to Syria with about a million and a half of her countrymen. The author of A Family in Baghdad fled also. Millions of educated and professional people are gone. They certainly can not come back to that hell hole we created. I am amazed what some people can call a success.
The insurgency has been financed by Saudi Arabia. Most of the insurgents came from there, Does that mean anything to you? We are not even dealing with the problem yet you see success.
Just this, for now. I owe a fuller explication, but just this point for now.
That’s mighty interesting time line you got there, Sam. Everything was shit until the Surge Ex Machina, and then…a dramatic turnaround.
Not how I recollect it. I recall, as the surge was being implemented, complaints that no such effect was to be seen. And the excuse offered was, well, the surge isn’t complete yet, when the surge is complete, then the wondrous effects will manifest. Mighty damned convenient, don’t you agree?
So, according to your approved time line, when did the surge happen? Apparently, it happened at a measureable moment, rather like 2 pm on Sunday, surge is complete, 3 pm, miraculous effects occur. So, when, exactly, was the surge completed, and what immediate wonders were made manifest?
And if, as you say, the change in strategy is the crucial point, then they were full of beans, no? Because if the strategy were effective, the effects would have been felt wherever and whenever it was implemented. If the surge strategy were targeted at fifteen locations, then we should have seen improvement as soon as any one of those fifteen were “surged”. At least in that location, no? Did we? Why then were we offered excuses?
And this…
All the trend lines? Some of the trend lines? Remember those benchmarks we were assured so gravely were the measuring stick? Remember how miserably those benchmarks were failed? Remember how we were offered precisely your rationale: well, some of the benchmarks were met, that’s progress, so we should stay. And we can’t leave because things will get a lot worse, we have that on the authority of people who haven’t been right yet.
But its that last bit. If things go to hell, we get to leave unless someone can come up with a New! Improved! Strategy! In which case we have to stay to allow that new improved strategy to take effect.
Have you any doubt, even for a moment, that a new improved strategy will be produced? And another, and another, and another? So the only time we can “cut and run” (as you insist on framing it, adding insult to injury…) is when we cannot find anyone to come up with a “new strategy”?
No. Just no. Six years is not “cutting and running”. Six years is slogging through a turd-infested fever swamp.
Sadr tries any of the crap he proposes (from hiding in Iran, no less) and his touted Mahdi Army gets the same treatment the vaunted Republican Guard got: elimination, and some at the hands of fellow Iraqis that are sick of his fomenting unrest.
Who is going to do most of this elimination? Who is going to pay for it? Will the eliminator recieve any benefit for its troubles, or is this strictly a humanitarian elimination mission you’re suggesting here?
The US, of course, and at this point, cost isn’t really an issue anymore, is it? And I am not suggesting specific elimination unprovoked, I am suggesting sending a crushing message to Sadr and his handlers in Iran to quit fucking with Iraq if Sadr follows through with what he claims he is “going to do”.
The guy is a fucking coward.