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If David Brooks is going to write a column about the Surge and intellectual honesty, he should probably mention such events as Moqtada al-Sadr's strategic pause, the 2005-2006 ethnic cleansing in Baghdad which helped reduce ethnic tensions by ending ethnic diversity, and the Anbar Awakening which required arming Sunni tribes and thus entrenching decentralization. Pretending that Iraqi violence and instability is an output with one input -- in this case, the number of American troops -- is foolish. That said, the argument over the surge was never an argument positing that more troops couldn't lead to less violence. Folks forget this, but the surge was actually part of Howard Dean's 2004 candidacy, when he was running as an anti-war candidate. In June 2003, on Meet the Press, he said, "I can tell you one thing, though. We need more troops in Afghanistan. We need more troops in Iraq now." I disagreed with him, but that was the plan: More troops, leading to less violence, leading to withdrawal. It was a plan that Democrats, even liberal Democrats, supported. Would Brooks like to credit Dean as a military visionary?The argument over Bush's surge was in fact an argument over whether we needed a strategy which continued the war indefinitely, or a strategy where success was defined in an achievable way, and an end was sought to the conflict. The former won out, and administration replaced political goals with security goals. But given sufficient manpower and treasure, America could tamp down on violence in Iraq indefinitely. We could start up a draft, and deploy 7 million troops to the country, which would probably quiet down daily squabbling pretty quickly. But many of us felt an endless deployment in Iraq was a frankly bad idea. This was because we felt the indefinite continuation of the war in Iraq a bad idea. My friend Matt Duss put it well in a post to Tapped last year:
