Old man yells at cloud.
If the reality you want won’t fit standard definitions, change your definitions so that they portray the reality you want.
State of the Anbar Awakening, September 2006:
Source: DoD. (Hat tip to Spencer “Sam Stone’s authority” Ackerman for finding this one.) Bolding mine.
And if you adopt that nebulous definition, then you have to acknowledge that what Obama has said about progress in Iraq – that it has come about because of a number of factors, of which the troop increase was only one element – well, the callow neophyte is right after all.
Hee!
[hijack]
Want a giggle? Check this out, about the signaling flags.
Man Overboard.
Put up a bunch of 10 foot high barricades throughout the city, and then claim a troop surge is responsible for the lower conflicts, priceless. Then stay on base and run less missions. Wow the surge works.
You guys are priceless. NOW you want to insist that the ‘surge’ reflects nothing but an increase in troops? I’ve been explaining the surge as the implementation of proper COIN strategy since it was first mentioned a year and a half ago - apparently to deaf ears.
McCain was absolutely right. The Surge as a change in tactics to ‘clear and hold’ instead of ‘run and gun’ was actually started by Petraeus on his FIRST tour of Iraq, many years ago. And his was the only region of Iraq that achieved stability - until that idiot Rumsfeld rotated him out and replaced him with a commander who put back Rumsfeld’s ‘cheaper, leaner’ strategy - which failed miserably.
The reason Bush approved the surge at all in Jan of 2007 was because it was already being implemented in areas that had the soldiers to do it, including Anbar province, and it was working very well. The surge of soldiers was required to implement the same tactics in Baghdad and other areas. And by the way, Bush’s own ‘surge’ speech described it as not just an increase in soldiers, but a shift in tactics to ‘clear and hold’. I guess you just weren’t paying attention.
As General Barry McCaffrey has said, the increase of soldiers was probably the least important part of the ‘surge’.
It’s not McCain’s fault that the media took a complex tactical shift and decided to represent it as little more than an increase in soldiers, or that you all couldn’t be bothered to actually learn what it was all about before sneering at it.
As for the Anbar Awakening, the shieks began to turn against al-Qaida in 2006 - but were having little success until proper COIN tactics were brought into Ramadi. Once the population felt protected, the pace of the Awakening increased dramatically. So it’s perfectly legitimate to state that the surge tactics were partly responsible for the success of the Awakening movement.
Of course, all this nitpicking over McCain’s dates sure helps obscure the fact that McCain was right in supporting the surge, and Obama has been completely wrong every step of the way, and his attempts to straddle the fence today are completely incoherent - for example his admission that the surge has been successful at quelling the violence and achieving stability in Iraq, but even knowing what he knows today he would still have opposed it. This makes no sense.
Obama not only opposed the surge, but he predicted that it would have the opposite effect that it had - that it would increase violence in Iraq. And even after it had shown dramatic signs of success, he was one of only 14 Senators to vote against funding for it.
Compared to that monumental error in judgement, going after McCain for slight errors in timeline seems kind of petty - and ultimately wrong. But hey, I guess you’ve got to fight back with whatever you’ve got.
Slight errors in timeline Sam? This is supposed to be McCain’s signature issue. The one he knows oh so much about.
That Iraqi civilians only suffer 500-1000 fatalities per month, down from 3000-3700 in late 2006 is a welcome development. But c’mon: this is due to the Anbar Awakening, the surge, and fact that the ethnic cleansing goals of each side were eventually accomplished.
The surge was only fully in place by what? early summer 2007? Mixing that up with October 2006 isn’t a minor detail.
And let’s remember context. Twice McCain mangled the identities of the main players in this civil war - the Sunnis and Shiites. Twice. And when asked about Afghanistan on Good Morning America, he tried to steer the conversation towards the “precarious situation” on the “Iraq-Pakistan border”. Iraq and Pakistan are separated by 1000 miles and 2 countries!
These aren’t verbal flubs. They betray an underlying imprecision of thought.
Face it, McCain simply isn’t a particularly bright bulb. Personally, I think he’s fully qualified to be a Senator - his staff can handle lots of the policy details. But he’s getting a little old to be President, though fans of Reagan will disagree on this point. (I’m trying not to overstate matters here: I’m saying that perhaps McCain is roughly as sharp as Reagan was c. 2004, and less acute than Nixon c. 1973.)
Sleeping at the switch has consequences, as the S&L crisis of the 1980s and the current financial crisis show.
Sam, what part of the larger strategy which you are describing, and for which I am perfectly willing to give the US military its fair share of credit, does McCain merit credit for? He pushed for an increase in troop strength, which came to fruition in June, 2007. But other than that, how does he come into it, other than that he was told about it?
I’m not claiming that McCain couldn’t recognize a good strategy when he saw it. I’m just saying that he can hardly at this point be called the single biggest factor for change in the overall change in the war, nor, for that matter can anyone else. A whole bunch of factors seem to have come together to make for a reduction of violence in the first half of this year, to the point where Iraq feels that the US can start withdrawing troops. I say that’s great. Let’s try. Maybe it will succeed. Nothing is written in stone at this point, and for all that McCain is trying to portray it that way, Obama has certainly not said anything that would suggest he would endanger either US troops, or Iraqi civilians or military in great numbers by hastening that withdrawal to meet some kind of timetable that is not turning out well, should things end up going that way. He has always said his job was a matter of setting the mission, not of demanding unconditional obedience to impossible orders.
McCain seems to be unwilling to even give this a try, although he’s being very evasive and fluid about the whole thing, so it’s hard to know. We do know that a few months he stated his perfect comfort with remaining as an essentially permanent occupying (non-combative) force, which it is evident the Iraqis do not want and the American citizens for the most part do not want.
WRT the Surge, McCain was apparently a confidant to some elements of and a mover and shaker of other elements of what has turned out to be a somewhat successful plan, one that has accomplished one of several goals and failed at several, in some ways more important goals such as political reconciliation. He gets a point for that, and certainly a point for caring and doing as he thought best, especially as it was somewhat politically unpopular at the time, although as a former war hero he had some maneuvering room there.
Obama, on the other hand, was vocally against the war from the beginning at a time when it could very well have been political suicide, and he had no POW history to cloak him with a flag of patriotism. He just had facts and sense on his side. As far as I’m concerned, he gets double points for that call. His vote against the surge, based on the information he had at the time, makes sense to me, and I certainly give him full credit for caring as deeply about his country as McCain does. I don’t know or understand the facts I do know well enough to judge how well the increase in troop levels that was the aspect that the Senate voted on to judge whether or not I agree with Obama or McCain at this time on this issue, but given their respective records up to this point, Obama gets the benefit of the doubt from me here. Obama doesn’t hesitate to credit McCain with the love of country that he so clearly has. Why can’t McCain do the same?
You know, McCain and I will rarely agree politically, but in 2000, had he been elected, I could have been reasonably satisfied. I would have felt we were on the wrong course politically, but I respected and trusted the man as an individual. But in the past eight years he has allowed his desire to become president to completely overpower him; he appears to have been completely taken over and he has sold out, changing his position 180 degrees on issue after issue. He has gone from a man I admired even as I disagreed with him to a man I can now no longer even respect except for his past heroics. I can only hope that if he gets into office, he will revert to the man I once saw. It makes me very sad.
Geezus, Sam. The surge was not a strategy…it was a tactic. The surge specifically refers to the increase of troops, a specific tactic in a larger strategic goal. Re-writing history to say the surge included the Anbar Awakening, paying off the Sunnis, clear and hold, etc is intellectually dishonest. Criminey, even in your own post you call the sujrge a strategy in the first sentence and tactic in the second.
The surge was a strategy which involved a change in tactics. Don’t nitpick. The point is that the whole purpose of the surge was to enable the military to shift to ‘clear and hold’. There is no debate about that. Bush said it in his first speech announcing the surge. Petraeus said it to Congress when he went to them to ask them to approve it. The increase in soldiers and the change to clear and hold are inextricably linked - one was required to facilitate the other.
And it’s absolutely true that the Anbar Awakening needed help from the Americans. Ramadi was the first place where ‘clear and hold’ was used, because it was one place where there were already enough soldiers to do it. And as soon as the Americans waded in and protected the population, the Awakening accelerated dramatically.
Where did I say that McCain was the single biggest factor for change in the war? If anyone deserves that distinction, it’s General Petraeus. McCain as a legislator gets credit for understanding what the General wanted, evaluating it, agreeing with it, and then supporting him.
Obama, on the other hand, remained one of an increasingly small number of Senators who simply refused to give Petraeus any credit, refused to vote for funding for the surge, and remained opposed even when all the evidence coming out of Iraq showed that his judgement was wrong and that the surge was working.
Even now, while Obama is willing to admit that the surge was beneficial, he bizarrely claims that knowing what he knows now he still would have voted against it. An amazingly stupid position to take.
Yes, tying his withdrawal to conditions on the ground now appears to be part of Obama’s strategy - now that he’s got his base locked up. But that’s not what he was saying before. He has always said that he wanted to start an immediate withdrawal, regardless of any conditions on the ground. His position was that the presence of Americans in Iraq was making the violence worse. He was clearly wrong.
McCain’s position is unchanged - the troops come home when the Generals say it’s time they should come home. Arbitrary timetables make things worse, because they give militants a goal to shoot for - just hang on for 16 months, because the Americans will be gone. So you never set arbitrary, binding timetables. You make it clear that you’ll stay there to finish the job for as long as it takes.
It so happens that conditions have improved so dramatically that it’s now looking like the troops can start coming home. This means Obama should thank his stars that no one listened to him and the surge took place, because now his ‘16 months’ is looking realistic - 18 months after he first demanded it. Needless to say, he’s now using this to say that he was right, and that McCain is moving over to HIS position. This is a load of nonsense.
[quoteWRT the Surge, McCain was apparently a confidant to some elements of and a mover and shaker of other elements of what has turned out to be a somewhat successful plan, one that has accomplished one of several goals and failed at several, in some ways more important goals such as political reconciliation.[/quote]
First of all, he was no more a ‘confidant’ than Obama. He didn’t have any secret information that Obama didn’t have. He just had better judgment.
And as for political reconciliation, you’ve got to keep up with the news.
From the Associated Press: New Iraq Report: 15 of 18 Benchmarks Satisfactory. Only two were unsatisfactory - a law to disarm militias and one to share oil revenues. This was as of May 2008 - more progress has been made since then.
Wasn’t a matter of paying attention, Sam, but a matter of not seeing anything wonderful. What is so dramatically new about pacifying a region and garrisoning troops to keep it that way? Because, boiled down, that what the COIN strategy is, and it is the same all the way back to ancient times. And the problem is still the same: when you garrison, you reduce your effective manpower. It demands more troops than simply “run and gun”. It also the tactic of an occupier.
And unless I’m very much mistaken (being only a DFH, I don’t have your encyclopedic grasp of things military…) this is precisely the line of reasoning followed by the generals who said we needed several times more troops than we were sending, no? A pity that Gen Petreaus was not advising them sooner, he might have shown them a compromise, a mere thirty thousand more troops was all that was* really* needed.
Doesn’t that strike you as a bit odd, Sam? Other generals of higher rank thought that so many more were needed, yet Gen Petreaus accomplished the same goal with much, much less. Little short of miraculous, wouldn’t you say? Do you commonly accept the wonderful at face value, Sam?
Unless, of course, there were other factors at play here. I submit to you that we have clear evidence that such is possibly, even likely, the case.
Which is to say, that if any one factor could be withdrawn from the equation, and still have results, that factor would be a troop increase, no? Being the least important factor. I’m a mite fuzzy on those other factors, perhaps you have those at your fingertips. Unless, of course, those factors are precisely those already mentioned, since your case weakens if we count those as being equally important or more important than the troop surge.
Perhaps. But there is a lot of wiggle room hidden in that little word “partly”. You see, if those other factors really are the overwhelmingly important factors, as your Gen McCaffrey suggests, then all of this might well have happened without any troop escalation, without the additional trouble and bad feelings amongst the Iraqi people. Since we were, and are, unpopular with the people of Iraq, this is a risk factor of considerable weight. Did someone investigate this potential, and report back that the Iraqi people so adore our presence there that more troops being sent, rather than withdrawn, would find favor amongst them? Seems hard to credit. Didn’t the surge take that very risk, the risk that it might blow up in our faces? Or was the situation so bad that it couldn’t get worse?
He acknowledges partial success, which is entirely sensible. You are presenting as “success” without the qualifiers it demands. Rather than a contributing factor, possibly a minor factor, you present it as Deus Ex McCaina.
Well, there’s a qualifier, at last! You soft-pedaling a bit, we’re down to “dramatic”, rather than the implied “miraculous”.
And it may yet lead to an increase in violence, the fat lady has not sung, Sam, she hasn’t even arrived at the theater.
Damn! I’ve hijacked my own damn thread!
I’d be interested in your take on the original subject, Sam, if you’ve the time and the inclination. Do you think its needful to protect your candidate from his own mouth in this way? Is it honest, are you proud of it? He doesn’t seem to have raised any objection, doesn’t seem to have furiously assaulted CBS for mucking about with the Straight Talk Guy. Seems rather odd for a guy so publicly devoted to candor, don’t you think?
The surge was not a legitimate step to take. The U.S. never had a legitimate military presence in Iraq (post-9/11, for the purposes of this discussion), and the only legitimate move to make with those troops was OUT of Iraq. And not through Iran, either. Maybe through Afghanistan.
OK, Sam? I honestly have to say that 18 months ago, I wasn’t paying enough attention to know. But the earliest I’ve seen, Obama was requesting a ‘slow, careful, safe withdrawl of troops,’ which to me sounds like paying a whole lot of attention to conditions on the ground. I mean, has anything Obama said or done led you to believe he’s stupid? You may disagree with him, but do you think he’s an idiot? What else would he be paying attention to? Air fares? I’m sorry, because I’m serious in my question here. I honestly don’t remember hearing one way or another, because I wasn’t paying attention that far back, but he’s claiming all along that he did say that he would be deferring to conditions on the ground, and I’m saying that this is implicit in the phrase slow, careful, phased withdrawl, which is what I was hearing a few months back. Were you hearing something different 18 months ago?
Run and gun is a video game term. Can you explain what this tactic entails? And how the current approach differs?
Could you please point me to one of those posts?
I tried searching (keyword “surge”, username “Sam Stone”) and didn’t find any of your posts on that subject. Did you, perhaps, refer to it by a different name?
Correct on all counts. Too bad that’s not what the U.S. was doing, until Petraeus was given the reins. The U.S. wasn’t doing it because Rumsfeld was convinced that America’s high-tech army was so superior that it could invade a nation and then pacify it from a distance, with high-speed patrols, UAV monitoring, and precision strikes. Petraeus said he was wrong, as did General Shinsecki and others. They were right, he was wrong. It took the sacking of Rumsfeld to get the U.S. to fight the war intelligently.
Petraeus wanted more than that as well. He worked with what he had. And the pace of reconciliation surprised even him.
I never said it wasn’t. The Anbar Awakening was very important. The cease-fire of the Mahdi army was important. But neither was sufficient. The Anbar Awakening was almost still-born, because al-Qaida was pretty ruthless at exterminating the first few people who stood up to them. And the Sheikhs who started the Awakening initially had difficulty getting the cooperation of the mass population, because they were thoroughly cowed by al-Qaida. The U.S. forces came in, garrisoned with the population and protected them, and they turned en-masse against al-Qaida.
Also, far more troops would have been required earlier in the war to achieve the same thing, because the Iraqi army was a non-entity. But by 2007, they were showing significant competence. The U.S. provided logistical support and force protection, allowing the Iraqi army to work with the Americans in protecting the population. A lot of the garrisons in the various towns and cities were part American, part Iraqi.
Perhaps the surge tactics could have been achieved without the extra soldiers, but that’s far from certain. It’s also possible that stretching the Americans that thin would have resulted in successful attacks against weakened American positions, more casualties, and fear in the population that the Americans weren’t up to the task.
But sure, it’s possible. But that’s not what Obama called for, is it? He called for an immediate withdrawal - one or two brigades a month, starting immediately. It seems pretty clear now that that would have been a disaster.
Do you have any evidence that the surge increased bad feeling among the Iraqi populace? It seems quite the opposite. Before the surge, the soldiers were forced to drive through areas in armored vehicles, shooting at anything that shot at them, causing collateral damage. And it’s pretty hard to win hearts and minds from inside an APC. All the evidence I’ve seen suggests that the surge, which allowed the Americans to work closely with the Iraqis, actually improved the image of Americans in Iraq.
There was simply no evidence that this scenario was likely to happen. And since it didn’t happen, and the opposite occured, it seems kind of weak to cling to it as a rationale.
No I didn’t. But what constitutes a ‘victory’ against an insurgency? There are no signing ceremonies, no surrenders. The insurgency just gradually weakens. Attacks will no doubt continue for years.
But let’s read what the Associated Press has to say:
In short, the U.S. forces are beginning a transition from war fighting to peace keeping. According to the AP, the insurgency is no longer a threat to the central government.
That’s probably the closest definition of ‘victory’ you’re going to get. Could it all go to hell again? Sure. Just like Chechnya could, or any number of other places in the world where peacekeepers are trying to keep various insurgencies down below the level where they present an existential threat to the nation.
Sure. Before the ‘surge’, the typical mission the Americans went on was to leave a fortified base, travel out on a patrol, perhaps engage some insurgents if they ran across them (usually by being shot at first), then return back to base. They’d get intelligence of insurgent activity somewhere, and go out again to engage.
What was happening is that the population would not cooperate with the Americans, because they knew that once the Americans returned to base the insurgents would hunt down anyone who cooperated and kill them. So the Americans were quite powerless to stop the insurgency. Sometimes they’d even be fed bad intelligence which would lead them into a trap. In the meantime, when the patrols weren’t active the insurgents would be free to set up IEDs. Often a patrol would go out, not see a single insurgent or get any tactical intelligence, but suffer casualties from IEDs.
However, this strategy required relatively few soldiers, because the soldiers could patrol multiple areas. That’s why Rumsfeld liked it.
Petraeus wanted the U.S. to adopt proper counter-insurgency tactics, which meant moving into a neighborhood, setting up a local base of operations, and staying there to protect the population. The soldiers never leave - they live with the population. Once the population realizes the insurgents can’t get to them, they start giving intelligence to the U.S. and Iraqi soldiers. This allowed them to smoke out the insurgents where they were hiding, and even to set up their own traps by feeding bad intelligence back to the insurgency.
In addition, living with the population helps forge ties between the average Iraqi and the Americans. Rather than patrolling from armored vehicles, the Americans are walking the streets, talking to people, helping to build schools and repair battle damage, etc. Hearts and Minds.
This required more soldiers to accomplish, because once the soldiers are based in a neighborhood they stay there and can’t patrol elsewhere. Hence the need for the ‘surge’.