by Eric Martin
David Brooks a week ago today:
But before long, the more honest among the surge opponents will concede that Bush, that supposed dolt, actually got one right. Some brave souls might even concede that if the U.S. had withdrawn in the depths of the chaos, the world would be in worse shape today.
That paragraph touches on, either expressly or implicitly, the various ways in which The Surge has been mythologized, exaggerated and shaped into a cudgel for political use, as discussed in Part I. There is the unqualified assertion that The Surge succeeded, that as a result victory is within reach, and that those that supported The Surge showed superior judgment and thus should be rewarded at the ballot box. That’s a lot of tendentiousness to unpack.
Initially, it is important to repeat, again, that the ostensible purpose of The Surge was to greatly reduce violence such that the various ethnic/religious/political factions could take advantage of the lull in fighting to nail down the many planks considered the foundation of long term, lasting political reconciliation (without which, presumably, the fighting will continue). As measured against its stated purpose, as enunciated by President Bush himself, The Surge has failed almost entirely.
Far from fostering political reconciliation, the Maliki government is losing allies and falling back on ever slimmer parliamentary majorities (if that). Most key components of the so-called benchmark legislation remain unpassed, and those measures that have passed (such as the relaxation of the De-Baathification law) have not been implemented in such a way as to achieve the desired result. It’s not enough to simply pass legislation with benchmark titles after all. The only worth such laws have is in how they effect the incentives of the warring parties, so implementation is everything.
The reasons that The Surge has failed should be familiar, and they reveal the serious conceptual flaws underlying this policy. First, The Surge was, by design, a short-lived troop escalation. As Daniel Larison points out, it was always unrealistic to expect that a temporary influx of soldiers would be able to hold the window open long enough to achieve the many difficult compromises associated with the reconciliation agenda.
But even that begs the question. The entire strategic foundation of The Surge rests on the assumption that the primary impediment to reconciliation is the violence itself – that if the groups could just stop fighting, they would agree to reconcile the issues that…led them to fight in the first place. That only confuses the symptoms for the pathology.
It is not intra-Iraqi violence that is preventing the parties from agreeing on a vision of the future Iraq and from sharing power and wealth in order to achieve reconciliation. Rather, the violence itself is a symptom of the unwillingness of groups with power to share, and the deep disagreement between many parties on a host of vital issues pertaining to the future character of Iraq as a nation (partition vs. unitary, sovereign vs. heavy-handed foreign presence, etc.).