Petraeus: Surge Worked (and the President agrees)
By Frank Hagan | Related entries in AfghanistanOn Fox News Sunday today, General David Petraeus, Commander of US Central Command, responded to a pointed question from journalist Chris Wallace with a surprising answer. To the question, “Did the President ever acknowledge that the surge in Iraq was successful?” Petraeus answered “He did, in fact”.
Having seen this with my own eyes, I went in search of other media outlets that have reported on the exchange, knowing the desire of some readers to question any Fox News attribution. A wide collection of conservative blogs cite the interview, all with variations on the theme that this is the “first time” President Obama has admitted the surge worked. Politico, the widely read political blog that may be less offensive to some reader’s sensitive Source-o-Meter, reports the original answer and even reported the follow-up:
“Although I would also tell you we haven’t spent a lot of time looking at the rear-view mirrors of the bus,” Petraeus said, adding that they talked about how reconciliation worked in Iraq and how they achieved population security there.
Is this really the first time Mr. Obama has admitted the surge worked?
The unpopular war in Iraq was a potent political issue in the primary campaign leading up to the last presidential election. By summer of 2008, the declining violence was seen as validating the efficacy of the surge among its supporters. The likely Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain, had been an early critic of President Bush’s handling of the war, and had long advocated a surge to bring the war to an end. By late July 2008, it was evident the tide had turned in Iraq, and most political observers thought this would work to the Republican’s favor.
But signs of then-Sen. Obama’s acceptance of the surge’s success can be found. ABC News reported on July 28, 2008:
Petraeus declined to comment about his meeting with the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, beyond saying that in their private talks, Obama conceded that progress had been made in Iraq.
By September 4, 2008, MSNBC was reporting candidate Obama’s stronger approval:
Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama said Thursday that the escalation of U.S. troops in Iraq, which he had opposed, has succeeded in reducing violence “beyond our wildest dreams.”
While the indications where there that Candidate Obama recognized the success of the counter-insurgency tactics of General Petraeus in Iraq, he tempered his remarks with a warning that political reconciliation was still out of reach, and ending the war in Iraq quickly was still his goal. But after the election, he has proven smart enough to not abandon a successful strategy, and continues on the path illuminated by General Petraeus.
It is no surprise, then, that the plan for Afghanistan is described by mainstream media op eds as a borrowed model. The Baltimore Sun’s Op Ed pages notes:
In crafting his Afghanistan troop surge, President Obama has borrowed liberally from an unlikely source: the playbook of his predecessor, George W. Bush.
…
Testifying Wednesday before the Senate, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates wryly drew some comparisons between the two deployments–including the need to explain the strategies in front of skeptical lawmakers.
“This is the second surge I’ve been up here defending,” Gates said.
Conservative bloggers are calling the adoption of the COIN strategy for Afghanistan validation of President Bush’s approach, and are pointing to today’s “admission” as further proof. But the ice is thin under the claim: it must be remembered that the surge happened only after President Bush finally gave up the failed “small footprint” policy, fired the generals in charge of it, and installed General Petraeus. Fumbling into a successful strategy after several years of failure is hardly a notable achievement.
But Sen. McCain was there ahead of all of us.
Cross-posted to FrankHagan.com
This entry was posted on Sunday, December 6th, 2009 and is filed under Afghanistan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
December 6th, 2009 at 9:08 pm
[...] Cross posted to Donklephant [...]
December 7th, 2009 at 10:08 am
How much credit do we really want to grant to Bush for finally buying into the use of counterinsurgency tactics to combat 3rd generation warfare? He did so only after the original approaches failed, as you point out.
I never really cared much about what Obama was saying in regard to Iraq, because he was mostly mollifying gullible progressives by appearing to say what they wanted to hear. If you parsed his words closely, I felt that he was expressing decent intelligence about matters. Obama’s main criticism was that we should have stuck to Afghanistan and not invaded Iraq. I was never even close to convinced that our foreign policy would substantially change if Obama got elected, and I said that often at the time. And taa-daa!
Here’s the thing about using counterinsurgency tactics to combat 3rd generation warfare. The credit should go to Bush or even to McCain. The tactics are emergent principles that folks on the ground developed and fought for and doggedly used and showed were the best practices. [Anyone interested should read The Sling and the Stone. Obama should, if he hasn't yet.]
Instead of turning these approaches into a political football game about who is a smarter military leader, let’s acknowledge the work of all the people on the ground who have worked so hard for these approaches to emerge. They are the ones who deserve the credit. McCain deserves credit for championing this approach, which showed some political courage, even though these ideas were quickly becoming au courant during the time when the original Iraq approaches were failing to get results.
December 8th, 2009 at 12:15 am
And let’s ignore the fact that giving Bush credit for finally locating a successful strategy is risible to those who disagree with the conflict. Successful extrication from a pickle doesn’t excuse the fact that you shouldn’t have put yourself in that position in the first place.