McCain, the Surge, the Awakening and CBS

[Sam_Stone]

@DiggitCamara

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?

Here’s one from a year and a half ago: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=8446086&postcount=20

[elucidator]

@Sam Stone

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…

Thats a mite confusing, Sam. Clearly, we can agree that Rumsfelds approach was short-sighted, but then you take a sharp left turn at al-Burkerkah.

The necessity of a much larger contingent of US forces was not a matter of winning the war, the Iraqi army fell apart like boiled kleenex and pretty much everybody knew that it would. Rumsfeld’s prime folly was drinking Chalabi’s kool-aid, as he cooed sweet nothings in his ear, happy, happy Iraqis tossing bouquets at freshly-scrubbed American heroes…well, I’m sure you remember. There wasn’t supposed to be an insurgency. Sectarian violence? Between who? Muslims and Muslims?

Now, they estimated several hundred thousand to be on the safe side, yes? This was the number to prevent any (unlikely) insurgency. Let’s call that number “X”. Now, as I said, I’m only a DFH, but seems to me that it would take X or more troops, not less, to stop an insurgency once it has already begun, once it is careening merrily along. So if it was going to take 200,000 troops to prevent an insurgency, how many does it take to stop one, once its got good and going?

So, in a nutshell…the expert opinions you’ve offered here are unanimous that a small-to-medium small boost in troops is very unlikely to have as dramatic an effect as you are swooning over. (And while I’m about it, from whence this effusive admiration for Gen Petreaus. From your narrative, looks like he grabbed the ball out of this McCaffrey guy’s hands, ran it into the end zone and spiked it…)

The best experts on the matter have, indirectly, offered testimony that the troop surge was, most likely, not central to the advancement of peace in Iraq.

So what mechanism can you offer for why. Was it a psychological boost, perhaps, reassuring the average Iraqi that rumors of our leaving…ever…are wildly exaggerated? No, I daresay the average Iraqi was not thrilled.

Is there a magic number? 150,000, you got chaos and havoc, stays constant up to 182,900 and then wham! threshold met, Sunni and Shia begin dancing around the May pole, holding hands…

So, whats the mechanism by which this improbable thing comes about? Unless, of course, it didn’t. Unless its entirely possible that the decline in violence can be completely explained by other factors already outlined. Absent such a mechanism, your scenario has no particular substance to recommend it.

Not to say it isn’t true, mind. Just, as Sportin’ Life tells us, “it ain’t necessarily so.”

Now, given that we have shown at tiresome length that the opinion that the surge was a bad idea and a needless risk of good people…Obama’s stance, vote, and opinion… would be wholly justified by the facts. One would not expect him to vote otherwise.

I admire audacity and risk taking, to a certain degree. But anteing up 30,000 more soldiers to draw one card to an inside straight is fucking stupid. And if you *get *it, its still stupid.

And say, long as we’re on the same planet as my OP: Whadday think about CBS editing the tapes so he doesn’t look so bad? You figure that makes them even for Rathergate? Like I said, didn’t hear anything about him objecting to that, Mr. Straight Talk, Captain Candor and Major Malfunction.

[kaylasdad99]

@elucidator

Thats a mite confusing, Sam. Clearly, we can agree that Rumsfelds approach was short-sighted, but then you take a sharp left turn at al-Burkerkah.

I saw what you did there.

[Measure_for_Measure]

@Sam Stone

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.

Kudos for mentioning the significance of the Mahdi army standing down.

You missed a trick though. Part of the Anbar Awakening involved transferring bribes and arms to the Sunni tribes. This entailed some serious risk of blowback, but it was essential if textbook anti-insurgency tactics were to be applied. Greater troop levels were not required for this prong though.

How do we parse the outcome among these 4-6 causes? Frankly, methinks we need to await treatment by a serious military historian.

McCain as a legislator gets credit for understanding what the General wanted, evaluating it, agreeing with it, and then supporting him.

This seems a little naive though. McCain positioned himself on multiple sides of this issue. Sometimes he was a cheerleader for the surge. At other times, he criticized it as too weak: he wanted more troops. As far as I can tell though, he never outlined a plan whereby that would be viable.

At any rate, his contortions permitted him to say, “Told ya so”, if the surge led to reductions in fatalities and “Ditto - you should have taken my advice”, if the Shiite population didn’t shift its support towards Maleki.

Ok, that’s politics, baby. A greater concern is that McCain chooses advisers with lousy track records. The neoconservative Randy Scheunemann was gung-ho on regime change and totally enthralled with the Iranian spy Ahmad Chalabi. Following that agent’s advice, Scheunemann supported DeBaathification and of course curbing the influence of the very-scary UN. Like too many modern conservatives, he underestimated the importance of both existing institutions and political legitimacy with disastrous results (for the US, not for Iran). I can’t see why anybody would take Scheunemann seriously, yet he is one of McCain’s point men.

[RedFury]

Forget the Surge – Violence Is Down in Iraq Because Ethnic Cleansing Was Brutally Effective

In depth article on the many failings and outright lies attributed to The Surge’s Success and how the US is now “winning” the war there…

[sqweels]

This is time to read the recent article by columnist Steve Chapman:

McCain’s confusion on Iraq

The Arizona senator sounded frustrated this week, insisting that Obama was “completely wrong” in opposing the Bush administration’s escalation of the war in January 2007. “The fact is, if we had done what Sen. Obama wanted to do, we would have lost,” he declared. “And we would have faced a wider war. And we would have had greater problems in Afghanistan and the entire region.”

What McCain omits is that if he himself had been right all the times before 2007 that he said things were going fine, no surge would have been needed.

If we had done what Obama wanted to do back in 2002, we would not have lost—because we would not have invaded Iraq to start with. We would not have suffered 4,100 dead and 30,000 wounded or burned through hundreds of billions of dollars.

We also would not have diverted ourselves from the correct focus of the war on terrorism. “Greater problems in Afghanistan and the entire region”? Apparently McCain hasn’t noticed that we got those in spite of the surge, or more likely because of it.