Wheat from the Chaff

Is it the "Surge" that's worked?

While many conservative supporters of the Iraq War have quietly disappeared - Dick Cheney notwithstanding - many have taken comfort in the apparent success of George Bush's "troop surge" of 2007.

Nevertheless, a great number of commentators have pointed to other factors in the decline of Iraqi violence. The New York Review of Books has published a number of articles [here and here, for example] that point to the salutary effects of the cease-fire declared by the powerful Shia leader, Moqtada al-Sadr, and the revolt by dozens of Sunni tribes and community groups against the violence of al-Qaeda "foreigners".

Michaels Massing's recent review of Thomas Ricks' latest book on General Patraeus nicely summarizes these factors, even though Ricks himself prefers to focus on the tactical changes brought upon by the leadership of General Patraeus and his staff. Massing notes that Ricks barely mentions al-Sadr, but Ricks is at least

... more expansive on the Sunni Awakening, recounting in detail how the tribes in Anbar province, enraged by al-Qaeda's growing brutality, began in September 2006 to turn against the group, and how the Americans quickly took advantage. "Whenever a tribe flipped and joined the Awakening," says a colonel who helped oversee the initial turnaround, "all the attacks on coalition forces in that area would stop, and all the caches of ammunition would come up out of the ground."

What's really interesting is that a major player in the troop surge, David Kilcullen, doesn't believe that the surge is the major reason for the decline in Iraqi violence. Massing goes on to explain that

The regularity of this pattern has led some observers—including many US officers—to conclude that the Sunni revolt was the main cause of the improvement in Iraq. They include David Kilcullen, Petraeus's counterinsurgency adviser. In his new book, The Accidental Guerrilla, Kilcullen writes that "the tribal revolt was arguably the most significant change in the Iraqi operating environment in several years."* Its impact, he argues, ran counter to what had been anticipated under the surge: instead of security improving as a result of changes imposed from the top down by US commanders, it occurred from the bottom up, with the US scrambling to respond.