Now that I’ve gotten my inner partisan screed out of the way, let me go ahead and say something I never thought I’d say. President Obama would not have been able to give the speech on Iraq that he gave last night if not for the surge that he – and I – vigorously opposed.
As we discussed at length back in 2007, the surge merely expanded and capitalized on an already-successful Anbar Awakening strategy. David Petraeus saw a successful counterinsurgency operation in the most troubled region of Iraq and managed to secure the loyalty of local Sunni tribes just long enough to evict the Islamist extremists from their midst. If Bush had done in early 2007 what I and most Democrats wanted it’s certainly possible that the Anbar Awakening would still have succeeded. But it’s less likely that American troops elsewhere would have been able to secure Baghdad – another key ingredient in the mix.
Bush made the decision and it worked. I credit him for that.
It doesn’t mean, of course, that the entire war was worth it. It wasn’t. Nor does mean we’ve won there. We haven’t. Iran has emerged as the greatest victor in Iraq. The surge gave us an honorable breathing space in which to leave the country to its own devices. And if McCain had been President, we would not be leaving Iraq right now. We would have found excuses to stay indefinitely. So, while Obama and I got the surge calculation wrong, I think we were right on the rest of the analysis: it was a tragically unnecessary war that did not appreciable advance our national interests overseas.
But it’s important to recognize where I, Obama and the Democrats were wrong on a key strategic decision in early 2007.