The Surge to Success

America’s most controversial war since Vietnam is into its seventh year. There are two schools of thought about what is happening in Iraq. The conventional wisdom is that it is a debacle, on the cusp of a civil war, and that it is good that the United States and her allies are finally in the process of withdrawing from this hell hole.

The second, more recent, version, involving an examination of the so-called surge of five US brigades to Baghdad and 4000 Marines to Anbar Province in early 2007, concludes that things are looking a lot brighter in Iraq than anyone had the right to expect in the first few years following the downfall of Saddam Hussein in April 2003. This is especially the case, given the record of suicide bombings, sectarian violence, messy negotiations and big political setbacks.

Bob Woodward’s The War Within can be seen as an attempt to discredit the old version and explain why the more recent interpretation is not without merit. To be sure, Woodward, a veteran Washington Post reporter and one of the most influential journalists in American history, is more concerned about providing a detailed picture of the internal deliberations of the Bush administration than taking sides in the intellectual spats over the importance of the surge in reducing violence in Iraq. His book, just like his previous fourteen, showcases the author’s extraordinary access to leading players from the President down. Still, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Woodward’s thesis gives weight to the Bush-was-right-on-the-surge school of thought.

Go back to mid-to-late 2006. The situation in Iraq is dire. And the consensus among the great and the good in America and abroad is that the venture is not only a misbegotten one but that the time has come to cut and run. But Bush, whom Woodward makes clear is the dominant figure in the administration (take that, Dick Cheney), and General David Petraeus, the new US commander in the field, decide to change strategy—and quickly. They are the heroes of the story.

For Bush, it is hard to resist the conclusion that his surge decision was the most impressive and courageous one he made in office. Other factors were admittedly important in reducing the violence: Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s decision, for instance, to order the Mahid Army to suspend operations, including attacks on Coalition troops. But the importance of the surge of US forces and of the intelligence with which they were deployed cannot be denied.

The success on the ground, as leading military strategist Lawrence Freedman argued recently in a review of the Woodward book in Foreign Affairs, also had to do with the extent to which the Iraqis turned away from the logic of civil war, notably because of a strong reaction among the Sunnis to the brutality of al Qaeda and a recognition among senior Shia figures that al-Sadr was acquiring a disproportionate share of the political agenda. 

Woodward spells out in detail how President Bush, in announcing the surge of US forces into Iraq which helped set the scene for the aforementioned incidents, bucked the conventional wisdom. This includes not just the editorial offices of the New York Times and the Guardian, mind you, but most members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the commander of the US Forces in Iraq, George Casey (“To win, we have to draw down,” he advises Bush), military analysts, the Democratic Party, much of his own Republican Party, most of the US foreign policy establishment, including the Baker-Hamilton Iraq

Study Group, and many within his own administration including Secretary of State Condi Rice, not to mention the public at large.

Now, I have written in these pages and elsewhere why the Iraq invasion was not only unnecessary but has turned into the mess-in-potamia out of which the US can’t extricate itself. I still subscribe to the former view, but I now have doubts about the latter position. As John Maynard Keynes, who is very much in vogue in both Washington and Canberra, once remarked: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” And the facts on the ground in Iraq have indeed changed.

Coalition military and Iraqi civilian casualties have been down significantly during the past two and a half years. The level of violence is the lowest since Saddam’s downfall. The Sadrist militia and other Shia militia groups have been disrupted. The Sunni Arabs, who once formed the heart of the Iraqi insurgency, are among the most steadfast coalition allies in the battle against al Qaeda. And as January’s elections showed, the democratic process may be the most effective way to defuse sectarian tensions and resolve disputes among feuding factions. These are facts that many opponents of the war routinely resist.

None of this justifies the original decision to invade Iraq in 2003. Saddam Hussein could have been contained as he had been contained since the 1991 Gulf War; and the costs of invasion in American and allied blood, treasure and prestige have far outweighed the benefits of liberating the unfortunate people of Iraq from a brutal tyranny.

It’s just that Bush’s surge and the accompanying changes in US strategy that Woodward identifies—such as a series of top-secret operations that allowed US military and intelligence agencies to locate, target and kill individuals in al Qaeda, the Sunni insurgency and Shia militias—have been major factors in the staggering drop in violence in Iraq.

Woodward, of course, is no sycophant. At times, he criticises Bush, accusing him of impulsiveness, carelessness and intolerance of confrontations and frank and fearless debate. Then again, no one would suggest that Bush was indecisive. Nor could anyone suggest that Bush’s assertiveness undermined the strategic thinking behind the surge that led to so much progress on the ground in Iraq.

Yet far from seeing reality more clearly, the anti-war activists on the Left and indeed some realists and neo-isolationists on the Right are still constructing a fictionalised version of what is happening in Iraq. Just ask yourselves: how many documentaries has the public broadcaster in Australia aired on the surge or at least on the dramatically reduced rates of violence in Iraq since the surge began? Compare these with the many documentaries on the folly of Bush’s war, which appeared all too often since the Australian winter of 2002, and you catch the significance of what Woodward is pitching.

It is true that in the months since January’s relatively peaceful and successful elections, security has been slipping in Iraq. In just a couple of days in late April, 150 Shiites were killed in suicide bombings. And the Shia-led government has been arresting some of the former Sunni insurgents who abandoned al Qaeda to fight with—and be paid by—US forces, which Woodward identifies as a key factor in the turning point on the ground. All of this suggests, as Petraeus himself has warned, that progress is “fragile and reversible”.

Overall, however, violence in Iraq is at its lowest since the first year of the war. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Malaki, encouraged by the recent elections, remains strong and confident. And there is emerging at least a chance to test whether the phrase “the democratic project in Iraq” is an oxymoron. Anyone who wants to account for this dramatic improvement should read The War Within. It is easily the best of Woodward’s four books on the Bush presidency.

Tom Switzer is a research associate at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney.