Bob Woodward contends, sensibly, that the surge is only one of several developments in 2006 and 2007 that served to eventually reduce violence in Iraq. Those developments included the Awakening Movement, the truce declared by Moqtada al-Sadr, special operations against al Qaeda leadership, and a completion of ethnic cleansing in Baghdad. In response, Max Boot argues that all of those trends are dependent upon the surge, including those that developed prior to the beginning of the surge. In doing so, he predictably distorts the evidence.
Boot's strongest point regards the use of special forces operations against al-Qaeda leadership. Such operations depended on the additional intelligence that a the expanded troop deployment provided, although the Awakening alliance also helped to provide crucial intelligence. On the Awakening specifically, Boot's case is remarkably weak; he simply asserts that success in Anbar depended on the troop surge (most of which was concentrated on Baghdad when Anbar province turned around), and cites as evidence developments in border areas of ... Afghanistan. The surge may have affected the calculus of Moqtada al-Sadr to declare a truce, but he also had other reasons, including a desire to discipline and reform his own organization, and to restructure that organization for electoral competition. Finally, on the argument that ethnic cleansing in Baghdad was substantially complete by July of 2007, Boot has no response whatsoever (although in fairness Woodward doesn't specifically invoke this argument), perhaps because the surge may have inspired a final, brutal round of cleansing in Baghdad's neighborhoods (recall that the first few months of the surge were the most violent months of the entire occupation).
Boot, like much of the conservative commentariat and the Republican presidential nominee, remains committed to the idea that the surge solved all problems in Iraq. Accordingly, narratives that diverge from this story have to be disciplined.
--Robert Farley
