Read Matt Duss on "the Surge." Glad as we all are that Iraq is getting better, not an inch of the improvement, so far as anyone can tell, is related to the surge, or has furthered the cause of national political reconciliation. There's been a drop in violence because Sunni tribes have turned on jihadists, because mixed areas have been ethnically cleansed, because certain factions are tentatively working together, because Sadr has decided to calm his militia's actions, and so forth.
We have surveyed this great bounty, noticed it has nothing to do with national reconciliation, and in fact points the other way, and happily embraced "bottom-up reconciliation," which means arming various tribes and warlords under the hopes that they later, voluntarily subsume their authority to a central government they loathe. The likelier outcome, of course, is that they do quite the opposite, and Iraq devolves into a warlord state. And that, too, will not be the fault of the Surge, because the Surge isn't the issue here, it's just the name of the military strategy the administration is using to try and take credit for changes in Iraq.
But these aren't changes that we wanted. Indeed, they're changes point away from the direction we've always claimed to favor, and are exposing the failure of our political strategy -- national political reconciliation -- which the Surge was supposed to abet. So judged on its original aims, the surge has been a tremendous disappointment, as we're moving farther from reconciliation by the day, and have in fact adopted an approach tailor made to impede a strong, centralized government. We've traded consolidation in Iraq for a bit of good news now. That may have been the right move. In any case, I don't think it's our choice. But pretending this is a strategy of some sort is ludicrous. It's strategic drift.
