Debate #1 Primer: Troop Surge a Success?

The first Presidential debates air Friday night, September 26th at 9pm Eastern from the campus of the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss). The topic will be foreign policy, which some say favors McCain. This week I'll be posting some interesting pre-reading for the debates.

Today, check out these several stories that challenge the notion that the "troop surge" in Iraq has been a success. This has been one of McCain's chief critiques of Obama, since McCain called for more troops early on in the war and Obama opposed the surge. Recently, Obama has even conceded that the surge was more successful than he anticipated, but there is a great deal of evidence that the surge is correlated to the decrease in violence, but not its cause.

As early as June, Max Bergmann was highlighting that McCain, not Obama, misunderstood the impact of the surge, chronicling the increase in violence during and immediately after the troop increase and demonstrating how a confluence of other factors could more accurately be credited with the subsequent decrease in violence. Most notably, Bergmann argues that we cut deals with the enemy--basically paid them off to stop fighting, and allowed ethnic cleansing to be near-complete in the most violent neighborhoods. So, violence decreased not because we prevented ethnic cleansing or achieved some kind of reconciliation, but because we allowed it to continue until the targets of opportunity were gone. In June, few people were listening.

Then in July, Joseph Palermo wrote about the fallacy of the "surge success story" saying:

"Any "success" that McCain or Bush or Kenneth Pollack or Michael O'Hanlon or Michael Gordon or David Petraeus and all the rest of the war-hawks talk about is delusional because it is proclaimed by willfully ignoring the humanitarian costs; the price in blood and treasure the Iraqis have paid, and to a far lesser extent, the Americans too. McCain is celebrating a Pyrrhic victory. The United States destroyed Iraq in order to save it."

Again, few people took notice.

This week, though Reuters published a story, complete with striking satellite imagery that confirms that entire neighborhoods have been cleansed of their pre-war population. The researchers behind the study confirm Bergmann's earlier assessment that ethnic cleansing was a primary contributor to decreased violence:


"By the launch of the surge, many of the targets of conflict had either been killed or fled the country, and they turned off the lights when they left," geography professor John Agnew of the University of California Los Angeles, who led the study, said in a statement.

Essentially, our interpretation is that violence has declined in Baghdad because of intercommunal violence that reached a climax as the surge was beginning," said Agnew, who studies ethnic conflict."



On September 19th, Bergmann wrote a follow-up piece titled "The Obvious Confirmed" and concludes:

"...when John McCain declares "victory" in Iraq and states that the increase of just 30,000 troops was the fundamental reason for the decline in violence, he once again proves that he has no idea what he is talking about."

Watch for this line of commentary to emerge in the debates and don't buy John's line that he was right all along.