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Defining Victory DownwardNo, the surge is not a success.

By Michael Kinsley
Posted Thursday, Feb. 21, 2008, at 2:59 PM ET
U.S. soldiers in Iraq. Click image to expand.

Why was President Bush's decision a year ago to send another 30,000 troops to Iraq called the "surge"? I don't know who invented this label, but the word surge evokes images of the sea: a wave that sweeps in, and then sweeps back out again. The second part was crucial. What made the surge different from your ordinary troop deployment was that it was temporary. In fact, the surge was presented as part of a larger plan for troop withdrawal. It was also, implicitly, part of a deal between Bush and the majority of Americans who want out. The deal was: Just let me have a few more soldiers to get Baghdad under control, and then everybody, or almost everybody, can pack up and come home.

In other words: You have to increase the troops in order to reduce them. This is so perverse on its face that it begins to sound zenlike and brilliant, like something out of Sun Tzu's The Art of War. And in Gen. David Petraeus, the administration conjured up its own Sun Tzu, a brilliant military strategist.

It is now widely considered beyond dispute that Bush has won his gamble. The surge is a terrific success. Choose your metric: attacks on American soldiers, car bombs, civilian deaths, potholes. They're all down, down, down. Lattes sold by street vendors are up. Performances of Shakespeare by local repertory companies have tripled. Skepticism seems like sour grapes. If you opposed the surge, you have two choices. One is to admit that you were wrong, wrong, wrong. The other is to sound as if you resent all the good news and remain eager for disaster. Too many opponents of the war have chosen option No. 2.

But we needn't quarrel about all this, or deny the reality of the good news, to say that the surge has not worked yet. The test is simple, and built into the concept of a surge: Has it allowed us to reduce troop levels to below where they were when it started? The answer is no.

In fact, President Bush laid down the standard of success when he announced the surge more than a year ago: "If we increase our support at this crucial moment, and help the Iraqis break the current cycle of violence, we can hasten the day our troops begin coming home." At the time, there were about 130,000 American soldiers in Iraq. Bush proposed to add up to 20,000 more troops. Although Bush never made any official promises about a timetable, the surge was generally described as lasting six to eight months.

By last summer, the surge had actually added closer to 30,000 troops, making the total American troop count about 160,000. Today, there are still more than 150,000 American troops in Iraq. The official plan has been to get that number back down to 130,000 by July and then to keep going so that there would be about 100,000 American troops in Iraq by the time Bush leaves office. Lately, though, Gen. Petraeus has come up with another zenlike idea: He calls it a "pause." And the administration has signed on, meaning that the total number of American troops in Iraq will remain at 130,000 for an undetermined period.

So, the best that we can hope for, in terms of American troops risking their lives in Iraq, is that there will be just as many next July—and probably next January, when time runs out—as there were a year ago. The surge will have surged in and surged out, leaving us back where we started. Maybe the situation in Baghdad, or the whole country, will have improved. But apparently it won't have improved enough to risk an actual reduction in the American troop commitment.

And consider how modest the administration's standard of success has become. Can there be any doubt that they would go for a reduction to 100,000 troops—and claim victory—if they had any confidence at all that the gains they brag about would hold at that level of support? The proper comparison isn't to the situation a year ago. It's to the situation before we got there. Imagine that you had been told in 2003 that when George W. Bush finished his second term, dozens of American soldiers and hundreds of Iraqis would be dying violently every month; that a major American goal would be getting the Iraqi government to temper its "de-Baathification" campaign so that Saddam Hussein's former henchmen could start running things again (because they know how); and "only" 100,000 American troops would be needed to sustain this equilibrium. You might have several words to describe this situation, but success would not be one of them.

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Michael Kinsley is a columnist for Time and the founding editor of Slate.
Photograph of U.S. soldiers in Iraq by Erik de Castro-Pool/Getty Images.
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Notes from the Fray Editor

"The Enron approach to Iraq"; soldiers look like "fat cub-scouts out camping"—this article produced some nice turns of phrase and comments: Jwschmidt gives a good overview here. Doodahman says (after some cheery general comments about Slate) "It's not the number of US troops on the ground…It's the number of Iraqis who are engaged in political violence that must be adjusted." The slasher14 knows what a Democrat, if elected in November, should do: go to other powers and say "let's cobble together an international force to control the situation until Iraq is stabilized." Xaedalus has a dramatic post about the choices open to the USA: the second option is not easy to contemplate.

Comments from the Fray

The surge has merely provided evidence that it is "boots-on-the-ground" that win a war, not necessarily superior precision bombing or big shiny tanks. Have a patrol every two blocks, and it gets pretty hard to snipe at someone without having people swarm all over you. Want to win COIN wars? Stop buying the military version of Lexus SUVs and ipods, strip down some of the bureaucracy (32 non-combatants to a soldier? please.), and build a bigger army. Ever watch those youtubes of the army in Afghanistan? It's like watching fat cub-scouts out "camping" in an RV: they stick close to their vehicles, and hardly ever venture out into the wild. Get those men out of their tanks and have them walk about and "take the fight to the enemy."

--hellifiknow

(To reply, click here)

[From "a proud member of the armed forces"] Unfortunately in debating rather than actually discussing the issues and moving forward we tend to argue over definitions. The surge has been a tactical and operational success, the Iraqi streets are more peaceful… Throughout the past 6-8 months, legislative and diplomatic issues that should have been negotiated in the Iraqi parliament, like oil sharing revenues and the amount of power local governors should have, let alone "who controls Kirkuk," have not been addressed. Meanwhile the surge has corresponded exactly with the Madhi army cease fire (which has been extended thank god, it means my friends will be safer.) Six months from now when the cease fire is called off and there are only 100,000 troops will the conditions be such that Baghdad will still be safer? If Baghdad descends into chaos then yes, the surge failed strategically. Soldiers will not be the ones who fail, they don't make strategy, the civilian control of the military with leading generals control strategy. (Don't get me started on diplomatic corps and the Iraqi parliament.) I don't think that my doubts undermines my pride in General Petraeus, and my belief that my colleagues and friends are the best soldiers in the world and performing above expectation. Please understand that this is real and not about Bill v. George, Republican v. Democrat. Someone who expresses doubts about the surge is not unpatriotic or being blindly partisan.

--hildy

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The Enron approach to Iraq: The "surge" seems like the military analog of the CEO who manages his business to show good results to Wall Street on a quarterly basis: you move sales from future quarters into the current one, defer spending to the future, and arrange for a few "one-time" charges to muddy the situation. You can't sustain this indefinitely--in the long run, the piper must be paid, and some future CEO will be reporting enormous losses as a result of your machinations. But by then you will have taken your golden parachute and moved on.

--ecoli

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