Bush gets no credit in my book for The Surge being his successful policy. It worked because General Petreus took what really needed to be done (counterinsurgency) and packaged it in terms Bush could understand (more troops).
But they’re liars. Kerry voted for the AUMF along with the rest of them. At most he would’ve refocused on Afghanistan like Obama.
It’s not OK to rob the bank if you get away.
Wrong on all counts.
The only “faulty intelligence” was that of the Neo-Cons who were so in love with Wolfowitz’s idiotic term paper that they were willing to lie to the American public, ignore the express concerns of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, allow themselves to be led by the nose by a thieving banker who was backed by Iran, and hire a bunch of advertising flacks as pretend “intelligence analysts” to massage intelligence reports by cherry-picking only the stuff that made them feel good while ignoring the actual intelligence agencies that disagreed with them.
There were never WMDs. Months before the invasion we already knew there would be no WMDs. (The Bush administration demonstrated that they knew there were no WMDs when they sent the troops in with no units assigned to look for WMDs and with battle plans that ignored the purported sites of WMDs claimed by the administration.) It was an intentional war, motivated by and carried out through lies, to carry out the pipe dream of some seriously foolish people who wanted to impose their will on a bunch of foreigners with oil. That is evil.
Then you should have said “continuing U.S. involvement” rather than picking out one flawed strategy.
Despite your claim, Kerry would no more have simply pulled out of Iraq than Bush did or Obama has done, so your premise is false from the get go.
As to the U.S. being in Iraq, I would agree that we had a responsibility to try to minimize further casualties, but only because we were responsible for the huge number of casualties, to begin with. I don’t heap praise on a kid for wiping up the spilled milk when he was the one who knocked the cup on the floor while trying to smack his sister with a spoon.
Seriously, what’s with the “surge” love in the US. I remember in 2005, a British general saying on BBC that the US needed to increase troop levels. I thought that flooding a place with troops is pretty much standard counter insurgency, which Rumsfeld and Casey refused to do mainly because they refused to believe it was an insurgency.
Nice to know that the Iraqis paid with their lives the baby bruised ego of America.
Are you really under the impression that we’ve garrisoned those countries for decades to prevent internal revolts there? Have you not yet learned in school what the Cold War was? :dubious:
That, and our policy of facilitating rather than suppressing ethnic cleansing in what became the effective partitioning of the country. Part of that was simple payoffs. Gotta feel some sympathy for Petraeus, having to pretend that wasn’t happening while catering to Bush’s desire to appear ballsy.
Well, they’re heathen foreigners and so aren’t really human. Their lives don’t actually count.
I’m enjoying this topic. I don’t have a lot to add, but Frank, you are kicking ass in this thread. Kudos.
Very specifically, what do you believe the exact goals of the surge strategy were?
Qin, can you explain to me exactly what America got out of the invasion of Iraq? Before we can determine if the whole endeavor was a success, can you please explain in concrete terms what success is supposed to look like in Iraq?
I’m sorry but how about the political will of Nouri Al Maliki to stomp down the Sadr militia which was entrenched in ‘Sadr city’ part of Baghdad?
A large part of the surge success came from good intelligence gathering, literally buying off and co-opting Sunni insurgents to go against Al Qaeda, and the political will of the Shia ruling class to suppress and overwhelm the Sadr populist movement.
People mistake the surge in purely military terms, the surge was a multilateral effort on all fronts to bring stability, which is what proper counter insurgency is supposed to do in the first place.
I’ve never understood this perception of the surge being* the *significant factor. What changed was the militias relationship with Al-Qaeda - in particular Al-Qaeda beginning to reveal their fundamentalism in relation to Iraqis. This gave the US an entre - the US bought the militias and turned them against Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
That had nothing - nothing - to do with GWB.
Too bad Halberstam didn’t live long enough to write a book about the Bush Administration. He had the perfect title on tap. 
Even if the surge was entirely responsible for peace and freedom forever, which I very much doubt, why should anyone get “credit” for solving a problem of his own creation by throwing away vast amounts of other people’s money and lives, in one failed attempt after another, until something finally worked?
There are more than 50,000 contractors there too.
When I see a cop I slow down, I put on my seat belt, I follow the law. The more cops I see, the more times that happens. Soon, I do it without having to see a cop.
That’s the idea. So yea it worked, of course. Did we train enough cops/fake out enough citizens to sustain it (seems like it, but I don’t follow Iraq much). We’ll see.
I agree with the OP in that I don’t believe that Bush is evil and that he lied in order to get us into war. That being said, by believing the faulty intelligence that lead to thousands of American deaths for pretty much nothing puts him on the idiot list in my book. And assuming that the Surge worked exactly as planned, he doesn’t get credit for correcting his screwup.
I’m not a hero if I put out a house fire that I started because I passed out drunk with a cigarette in hand.
Most of the deaths were caused by the various militias and terrorists not by American soldiers. And more people would have died had Iraq balkanized
And the Democrats and antiwar wanted to just pull out not implement counterinsurgency tactics.
Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and a whole bunch of other Democrats and Republicans flip-flopped in the course of 2005 and '06. Simply put, why would Kerry want to fight on in an unpopular war if pulling out would boost his popularity?
And I agree that was a grave mistake.
I know, however in the first decade or so at least the presence of American soldiers did help democratize Germany and Japan and the presence of American troops in Korea like those in Iraq was to protect its government and maintain stability. The difference is that Iraq’s problems were internal.
To bring stability to Iraq/
Well originally the Iraq invasion was to remove WMDs and/or prevent their construction but since there were no WMDs, our main goal was to make sure Iraq was a free and stable country.
This goal has mostly succeedeed and an anti-American dictator who posed a threat to American interests is gone/
if only. Bush said the surge’s main goal was to provide the “breathing space” to stabilize Iraq’s government, not just the streets. There is no evidence that this goal has succeeded. In fact, at least one conservative is willing to look at what Bush promised the surge would do, and what has been achieved… and he come away very critical.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/2010/04/06/by-its-own-standards-the-surge-failed/
At a cost of $800 billion and 4400 American lives. Was it worth it? Should we spend the same blood and treasure next time a a dictator makes empty threats against us?