Iraq War, Surge

President George W. Bush, on January 10, 2007, announced that the US would surge at least 20,000 additional troops to Iraq, to improve security in the Baghdad to a point where the remaining Iraqi Security Forces could control violence from Iraqi sects and foreign sources.

Intended to be more policing and engaging directly with the people, the approach was "population-centric" rather than "enemy-centric."

Implementation

It was a campaign, ordered by GEN David Petraeus, the senior commander of coalition forces in Iraq (Multi-National Force-Iraq and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. Planning was by a Joint Strategic Assessment Team led by COL H. R. McMaster (U.S. Army) and David Pearce (U.S. State Department). Operational control would be under Multi-National Corps-Iraq, under LTG Ray Odierno, with tactical operations under Multi-National Division-Baghdad, built around the 3rd Infantry Division under MG Rick Lynch.

Context

Linda Robinson, a journalist and author of Tell me how this ends: General Petraeus and the search for a way out of Iraq, was invited to discuss the general situation with the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. While her talk focused on the surge, she said it was necessary to set a context, and began by saying that the insurgency was caused by the early decisions of the US Coalition Provisional Authority for debaathification and disbanding of the Iraqi military. While an insurgency was already in progress January 2005, the next contributor was having an election that was boycotted by the Sunni comunity. This election created the body that would write the constitution. Ambassador Zalmay Khalizad made an "agreement was made that there would be constitutional revisions considered and implicitly a guarantee that some at least would be adopted within four months of the seating of the new parliament. And that agreement was never honored, still has not been to this day."

Evaluation and recommendations

Opinions of its effectiveness vary with the source. It clearly reduced violence, but the issue of whether Iraqi forces can sustain the security is an open issue, fraught with complexity, and sometimes viewed through an ideological prism. Nevertheless, it is an attempt to deal with a situation where there are no ideal options.

In January 2008, Senator Jack Reed (D-Rhode Island) termed the surge a failure.

Thomas Ricks said the American people have difficulty in understanding:

1. "how difficult the surge was and how different it was from the previous four years of the war
2. that the surge failed, judged on its own terms
3. the war is not over. In fact, I suspect we might be only halfway through it, which is to say that President Obama’s war in Iraq may well be longer than George Bush’s war in Iraq, which was five years and ten months old when Bush left office."

Ricks also describes the surge as demonstrating a new humility in the US approach to the war. Emphasizing how much of a change it was, he said "With the advent of the surge, the Army effectively turned the war over to its internal dissidents." GEN Petraeus took command after being deeply involved in a writing a counterinsurgency manual, the guidelines of which were not followed in the first year of the war. Ricks says Ambassador Ryan Crocker "reveals in my book that he had essentially opposed the original invasion of Iraq."

What is the potential outcome? Ricks said that

The best-case scenario is that Iraq isn’t going to look anything like a success to Americans. It’s not going to be democratic, it’s not going to be stable, and it’s not going to be pro-American. Ambassador Crocker predicts in the book that the future of Iraq is probably something like Lebanon today. Most of the other experts I’ve talked to consider that wildly optimistic.