Surges and timelines and "war"

The Bush administration will apparently agree to removing all US troops from Iraq's cities and villages by next June, with a complete pull out by the end of 2011. Note, though, that they are also stating a proviso that the proposed timeline will be subject to a review of "events on the ground", as usual. It's more of an "aspirational goal". Meaning they really do not want to be bound by such a plan, regardless of what Iraqis have to say about it.

Supporters of Bush military strategery, in particular the Surge™, would like us all to humbly apologize for ever opposing the Surge™, for ever doubting the supreme wisdom of the president and his generals.

Not so fast, kids.

I opposed the Surge™ for a few reasons, and I don't think any of those reservations have been resolved or proven wrong. Yes, if you put armed soldiers on enough street corners, violence in the immediate area will likely decrease. That isn't exactly deep thinking.

The Surge™ did not address the political and civil structure of the country. In fact, the successes touted by the administration over the past two years have often been dependent on the very fractures that keep Iraq from full political progress. In other words: if the majority Shia run the Sunnis out of a neighborhood, then sectarian violence in that neighborhood stops. This is a strategy still employed by Shia and Sunni throughout Iraq, creating a still growing wave of Iraqi refugees.

The Surge™ also takes a great deal of credit for decreases in violence which are due to the Sunni Awakening- those former insurgents who have been on our payroll to police their cities since about a year before the Surge™ began. This is particularly true outside of Baghdad, where the majority of Surge™ troops are focused.

But the majority Shia in the Iraqi government really don't like the Awakening, and are targeting them for arrest and imprisonment. We and the Sunnis had asked that they be trained and moved into the Iraqi armed forces, but that isn't happening at any great pace. Instead of integration and unity, we are simply seeing governmental reinforcement of the sectarian divide.

And that doesn't even address the Kurds, who are still a regional power in their own right. It doesn't address the still unbuilt infrastructure, which could be funded at this point by Iraqi budget surpluses.

The problem is that we keep calling this a war, and thinking that we can fight our way to victory. But if the Surge™ was supposed to "give the Iraqi government breathing room" so that they could build civil and legal frameworks and agreements, and make progress in uniting the country and so forth, how can we call what we're looking at now a victory? Iraq is still a deeply divided country, and it looks to me like the government will have a tough time getting to real reform because none of the key players trust each other, nor do I think they have developed a shared vision of what a healed Iraq will look like.

The Surge™ was and is a flawed approach because it is an extension of the same thinking that got us into this mess: that American military might is the sole answer to all questions, that this is a "war" at all.

It's an occupation, and not a well executed one.