The Failing Surge

The outcome of the war in Iraq may now rest in large part on the success or failure of the so-called surge. Beginning in February, the White House sent an additional 28,000 U.S. troops to Baghdad in an effort to quell the violence there. Securing the capital with overwhelming force is a key component of the anti-insurgency plan developed by Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq and the military’s foremost expert on counterinsurgency tactics. It took until June for all the U.S. forces to be put in place, and the number of American troops in Iraq is now at its highest level since 2005. But is Petraeus’s plan working?

The index’s (Center for American Progress Terrorism Index) experts don’t think so. More than half say the surge is having a negative impact on U.S. national security, up 22 percentage points from just six months ago. This sentiment was shared across party lines, with 64 percent of conservative experts saying the surge is having either a negative impact or no impact at all. When the experts were asked to grade the government’s handling of the Iraq war, the news was even worse. They gave the overall effort in Iraq an average point score of just 2.9 on a 10-point scale. The government’s public diplomacy record was the only policy that scored lower.

These negative opinions may result in part from the experts’ apparent belief that, a decade from now, the world will still be reeling from the consequences of the war. Fifty-eight percent of the index’s experts say that in 10 years’ time, Sunni-Shiite tensions in the Middle East will have dramatically increased. Thirty-five percent believe that Arab dictators will have been discouraged from reforming. Just 5 percent, on the other hand, believe that al Qaeda will be weaker, whereas only 3 percent believe Iraq will be a beacon of democracy in the Middle East.

Source: Foreign Policy Journal

See the entire report at: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3924
(you might need to register)

I have a subscription to this journal and frequently use it in the class I teach in international politics. I like FP because it is more accessible than normal academic journals, but also because it usually presents an even, well-balanced, and well-researched analysis of issues by leading figures from academia, politics, and policy, often with rebuttals from an opposing side. I find it interesting, disheartening, but rather not surprising that one of their lead stories for this month would be on the general and growing consensus among policy experts that the surge is failing. It's sad. Most everyone now agrees that the US-led invasion has f***ed the entire region for years to come. Super. Remember this when you go vote. Find a candidate that doesn't think war is a good idea, maybe one that wants to establish a Department of Peace. Yeah, sounds a little cooky, right? How does it sound compared to a multi-trillion dollar war that has cost upwards of half a million lives and destabilized a whole region. A little less nutty? Yeah, I thought so.