Marc Lynch has a nice argument pushing back on the conventional wisdom that Bush's finest moment in Iraq was the surge. "Perhaps we could have another round of arguments as to whether the surge brigades arriving in the spring of 2007 caused the Sunni turn against al-Qaeda in the fall of 2006?" he asks. But he's willing to give a bit of post-partisan ground. Bush did have a genuinely admirable turn in his Iraq policy. But it wasn't the surge. It was the Status of Forces Agreement. "Signing a Status of Forces Agreement requiring the full withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Iraq on a fixed three year timeline demonstrated a real flexibility on Bush's part," says Lynch. "It demonstrated a pragmatism and willingness to put the national interest ahead of partisanship that few of us believed he possessed. It is largely thanks to Bush's acceptance of his own bargaining failure that Barack Obama will inherit a plausible route to successful disengagement from Iraq."
