The surge is a lie. A really dangerous lie.

The mythology of the Iraq War “surge” has been driving me bonkers for years — since at least as far back as 2009 or so, I think; I can’t remember exactly when I started getting into huge arguments with Republicans about it, but I remember a lot of arguments.

The surge was self-evidently a total failure even then, if you measured it by George W. Bush’s own stated objectives: suppress the violence long enough for a political solution to be reached.

As usual, like they did at every point in that war, the administration moved the goalposts to include only the first half (violence reduction) after the second half didn’t work (no political solution) — and many Republicans thus incorrectly believed it had been a success (because the violence was briefly suppressed). Unfortunately, it was an indivisible twin mandate, with the second being vastly more important and meaningful. Achieving the first part without the second can only be read as an expensive and bloody prolonging of the existing failure.

In a comprehensive article for The Atlantic entitled “The Surge Fallacy”, Peter Beinart makes the same point I’ve been making for years now — and extends out the hugely frightening consequences of the myth taking hold in place of the reality so quickly:

Above all, it’s the legend of the surge. The legend goes something like this: By sending more troops to Iraq in 2007, George W. Bush finally won the Iraq War. Then Barack Obama, by withdrawing U.S. troops, lost it.
[…]
In the late 1970s, the legend of the congressional cutoff [as a purported cause of failure in Vietnam]—and it was a legend; Congress reduced but never cut off South Vietnam’s aid—spurred the hawkish revival that helped elect Ronald Reagan. As we approach 2016, the legend of the surge is playing a similar role. Which is why it’s so important to understand that the legend is wrong.
[…]
In 2007, the war took the lives of 26,000 Iraqi civilians. In 2008, that number fell to just over 10,000. By 2009, it was down to about 5,000. When Republicans today claim that the surge succeeded—and that with it Bush won the war—this is what they mean.

But they forget something crucial. The surge was not intended merely to reduce violence. Reducing violence was a means to a larger goal: political reconciliation. Only when Iraq’s Sunni and Shia Arabs and its Kurds all felt represented by the government would the country be safe from civil war. As a senior administration official told journalists the day Bush announced the surge, “The purpose of all this is to get the violence in Baghdad down, get control of the situation and the sectarian violence, because now, without it, the reconciliation that everybody knows in the long term is the key to getting security in the country—the reconciliation will not happen.” But although the violence went down, the reconciliation never occurred.
[…]
The problem with the legend of the surge is that it reproduces the very hubris that led America into Iraq in the first place.

 
He then cites various harebrained Republican proposals to invade and occupy pretty much every country in the region based on the premise that the Iraq surge was a huge success and more troops = more success.

Less discussed perhaps is how President Obama, while taking much of the wrongful blame for “losing” a war that was already long lost in Iraq, seems to have managed to validate much of the mythology by trying to apply the surge approach (twice?) in Afghanistan with costly non-results.

But that ship has already sailed. In contrast, there is no need for the United States to make the same errors elsewhere going forward in the coming months and years. Misunderstanding what happened in Iraq after 2006 is likely to ensure a repetition of catastrophic mistakes.

Pictured: A December 2007 suicide car bombing in Baghdad during the surge. (Credit: Jim Gordon via Wikimedia)

Pictured: A December 2007 suicide car bombing in Baghdad during the surge. (Credit: Jim Gordon via Wikimedia)

August 12, 2015 – Arsenal For Democracy 138

Posted by Bill on behalf of the team.

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Topics: Key news stories from Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Iran (and how it all relates to or affects U.S. policy in the region). People: Bill, Kelley, Nate. Produced: August 10th, 2015.

Discussion Points:

– Syria: The U.S. bombs fictional terror groups and Turkey bombs the Kurds.
– Iraq: On air conditioners and nation-building.
– Yemen: Saudi Arabia’s war and a horrific humanitarian crisis.
– Iran: Will the Iran Deal survive Congress? Will it change US-Israeli relations?

Episode 138 (56 min):
AFD 138

Related Links

AFD: Syria Archives
AFD: Iraq’s air conditioner uprising
AFD: Yemen War Archives
AFD: Iran Archives

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Iraq’s air conditioner uprising

Arsenal Bolt: Quick updates on the news stories we’re following.

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Washington Post: “Iraqi leader announces measures aimed at fighting graft, dysfunction”

The protests came amid a searing heat wave that saw temperatures rise to than 120 degrees. The heat has been particularly unbearable because of the country’s limited power supply, which gives Iraqis only a few hours’ worth of electricity a day to run fans or air conditioners.

The country’s powerful Shiite militias — whose political influence has grown as they overtake the Iraqi army in the fight against the Islamic State — also threw their weight behind Friday’s protests. Their participation presented an unusual challenge to Abadi from his own Shiite constituency. The demonstrations also prompted the office of the influential Shiite religious leader Ayatollah Ali Sistani to urge Abadi to implement more sweeping measures. Sistani said Friday that Abadi had not done enough to fight corruption within the Iraqi state.

 

US weapons flood risks destabilizing Iraqi Kurdistan

A new report in Foreign Affairs argues that the uncontrolled flood of weapons from U.S. government sources to Iraqi Kurdish officers in the field and official weapons grants routed through Baghdad (all for the purpose of fighting ISIS quickly, of course) is undermining years of careful work to professionalize the Kurdish peshmerga forces and bring them under civilian authority and a unified military chain of command regardless of Kurdish political parties. This U.S. policy could destabilize the region — which has previously been a fairly steady oasis in the country — and trigger the final exit of Iraqi Kurdistan from Iraq as a whole.

The military aid is uncoordinated, unbalanced, unconditional, and unmonitored. Because of the lack of oversight on weapons’ allocation, and because the weapons come with no strings attached, officials can direct them to their own affiliated peshmerga forces, empowering loyalist officers and entangling the rest of the officer corps in petty rivalries. All this distracts the peshmerga from the real task at hand: assessing, preparing for, and countering terrorist threats. To fix the problem, the U.S.-led coalition should place any assistance under a single command, under civilian control and away from political rivalries.
[…]
The West has failed to consider both the evolution of the peshmerga and Kurdish politics in general. It has conditioned weapons deliveries to the KRG on the approval of Baghdad, a policy designed to keep the Iraqi capital sovereign and to discourage total Kurdish independence. But the policy is outdated. Today, the PUK is ascendant in Baghdad, so channeling weapons to the Iraqi government has only further alienated the KDP from the central government. In turn, KDP officials have made increasingly provocative calls for independence and solicited direct arming to cut out Baghdad, which it views as being dominated by Iran. Western policymakers might shrug, believing that such divisions will at least prevent the parties from successfully joining together to press for an independent Iraqi Kurdistan; in reality, these divisions prevent Kurdish parties from effectively participating in the Iraqi state.

 
This doesn’t automatically mean the United States and its allies should not be supplying weapons to Iraqi Kurdistan’s peshmerga forces, but it does signal that the policy should be reorganized.

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Iraq’s army is still comically terrible

(Comic in the cosmic sense. Not for the people affected in Iraq.)

ABC News reports that hundreds of ISIS fighters walked into a city that days earlier had had thousands of Iraqi troops: “Ramadi Fell to ISIS Fighters Even Though They Were ‘Vastly Outnumbered’ by Iraqi Troops”

The pullout of the Iraqi counterterrorism unit from Ramadi first appeared in the Kurdish news agency Rudaw. The departure of that elite unit led other Iraqi military commanders in the city to order the departure of their troops even though they held a significant numerical superiority, the U.S. official said.

 
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According to the anonymous Kurdish commander interviewed by Rudaw (linked above), the well-armed, American-created Special Ops unit began disappearing from Ramadi in the lead-up to the ISIS takeover. The Office of the Prime Minister of Iraq had not ordered the withdrawal and was not informed of it until the other units began calling it in and asking what was going on.

And in an eerie echo of the fall of Mosul 11 months before:

They pulled out so fast that in most cases they left their vehicles intact with their weapons and ammunition inside. […] By the evening of that day, most of the soldiers of the Special Operations had fled. Even the personal guards of the commander took with them their six Humvees and left the commander alone.

 
All the other units that remained were vastly less well-equipped to withstand an ISIS assault and felt they had little choice but to retreat hastily.

We torched what we couldn’t carry to prevent it from falling to ISIS. […] At 6pm, I was still inside the city stadium. When I realized it was all lost we pulled out, too. Along the way out of Ramadi I caught up with the force that had withdrawn earlier. There were 600-700 vehicles filled with soldiers, police officers and their families.

 

A tentative thought on presidential qualifications

I’m not 100% sure about this, but I feel like we Democrats should probably stick with nominating people who didn’t vote for the Iraq War, given that the whole “well that was a world-altering catastrophe” thing hasn’t really stopped being true…

I realize that we’re not “supposed” to bring this up twelve years after the Iraq War started, but people who voted for the Iraq War should probably be automatically disqualified from being President of the United States. As a lifetime policy.

Anyone who cast that vote was exercising astonishingly bad judgment whatever their reasons — whether that person was a true believer, fell for the lazy/massaged intelligence without looking into it independently, or was scared about the short-term political ramifications of voting no. The important fact is that the consequences of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 for the world and for the United States were catastrophic. I know that — 7 years out from Bush and 12 out from the invasion — it can seem a bit distant today. But the resulting mess we’re in over here and the resulting mess they (with our continued involvement!) are in over there is ongoing. It is still not done blowing up in our faces and causing misery for the people who actually live there.

Even if it were true that we could have no way of knowing what would happen, it did happen, and it means anyone who supported the war made an appalling call that will haunt their foreign policy record forever, just as it financially and strategically haunts the United States and violently haunts the Middle East.

But at any rate, it wasn’t actually that hard to know at the time why the war was a bad idea. I was basically a child when the Iraq War began, but my social studies teacher made sure we knew about Iraq’s sectarian division. Which — newsflash! — any adult in politics in October 2002 who remembered back just 11 years to 1991 should have known about too. I also knew the difference, as a child, between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. Our actual elected government pretended not to.

I’m sure plenty of potential candidates who didn’t vote on the Iraq War or express a view might do worse as president. That’s unknowable. But at least we know for sure that they didn’t do that. There don’t seem to be a lot of serious consequences in Washington for grievous policy errors abroad. There probably should be.

ISIS obliterates ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud dig sites

Priceless undiscovered antiquities in the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud, 20 miles south of Mosul (and ancient Nineveh), were lost forever in recent days as ISIS continued its purge of pre-Islamic history in Mesopotamia by packing dig sites with explosives and blasting them into oblivion.

Flashpoint Intelligence, a global security firm and NBC News consultant, could not confirm that the site being destroyed in the video is in fact Nimrud, but it said “online chatter does seem to corroborate the claims, and the rest of the video does follow the group’s pattern of destroying ‘idols,’ as they call it.”

 

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The city was built more than 3,000 years ago in the Middle Assyrian Empire and eventually became the capital of the later Neo-Assyrian Empire, under King Ashurnasirpal II, a brutal conqueror who shocked much of the surrounding region but also loved art promoting his success.

Last month, the terrorist organization destroyed exposed/above-ground excavation sites (some opened in the mid-19th century) with bulldozers and released footage showing fighters smashing ancient statues — including the world-famous lamassu winged bull-men — and wall reliefs from the city that is mentioned in the Book of Genesis.

Even some early Islamic sites have been devastated or erased by ISIS attacks including the Tomb of the Prophet Jonah in Mosul last July.