Barack Obama Admits the Surge has Worked on the No Spin Zone

The surge worked — depending of course on how you define the “surge” — for three main reasons. First, beginning in 2006, and continuing under Gen. Petraeus, the US military began arming and funding Sunni militias in western Iraq who made up the bulk of the insurgency and had formerly been allied with Al Qaeda. With US bribe money in hand, these militias are now either fighting Al Qaeda side by side with US forces, or at the least they’re no longer shooting at us. Deprived of insurgency support, Al Qaeda has been marginalized and driven into the far corners of Iraq.

Second, the ethnic cleansing of Sunnis by Shiite militias in Baghdad was nearly complete by late 2007. (Most Sunnis who were not killed had fled the country; there are now some 1.5 million Iraqi Sunni refugees in Syria, three quarters of a million more in Jordan.) With few Sunnis left for the Shiites to shoot at, American casualties have also declined.

Finally, the cease-fire called by Moktada Al-Sadr. With his military objectives — the aforementioned ethnic cleansing — all but complete, Al-Sadr had little to lose militarily, and a lot to gain politically, from a cease-fire.

Note that the main reasons for the reduction of American casualties and the stabilization of Iraq have little to do with troop escalation. They came about because the Bush administration quietly changed course and began striking deals with a Sunni insurgency it formerly insisted simply on shooting at in central and western Iraq, and because the Shiite militias in Baghdad have achieved their major military goal.

I’m ecstatic that, after five years of disastrous policies conducting a tragic war that we should never have started, the Bush administration is finally getting something right. I’m elated it’s beginning to look like we might coming to the end of this sorry chapter of American history.

I’m appalled at the extent of the silent tragedy of the Iraq war that goes unmentioned by either candidate — but especially by McCain who still champions an open-ended conflict: millions of Iraqi refugees who may never be able to return to their country; hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead as a result of the US invasion; and tens of thousands of Americans permanently maimed in the service of a war that never should have been. Support our troops? Absolutely. Let’s support them by getting them out of harm’s way as soon as possible, and by not being so gung-ho next time to put them there in the first place.

Obama isn’t right about everything. But he was right to oppose the war, and he was right to oppose the escalation.

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Deb: “Gung-ho? Americans are NEVER ( and I don’t use the word lightly) “gung-ho” to start a war”

Perhaps you missed 2003. Bush and the neo-cons were so desperate to get into Iraq they couldn’t even give UN inspectors six weeks to wrap up their work.

The Bush administration *wanted* this war. It was clear in 2003, and it has been corroborated by a number of ex-administration officials since then.

Deb: “Brave men & women VOLUNTEER for the service because they want to defend the country that is the leader of the free world”

Men and women volunteer for military service for many reasons: sometimes to get out of bleak economic situations, sometimes for the benefits military recruiters offer, sometimes out of patriotism. Both my father and one brother served in the military, and, while they are both patriotic, neither enlisted out of idealist patriotism. Nonetheless, neither they, nor anyone I’m personally acquainted with *wants* to go to war (unless by “defend our country” you mean something else than taking military action).

Hey, I’m all for defending the US. Convince me that invading Iraq has anything to do with that. Iraq had no connections with the terrorists who instigation 911 (unless you count letters forged by the Bush administration), nor did Hussein present any credible threat to America in any way. What, precisely, are we defending ourselves against?

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