What will the Surge teach us?

On Saturday, the Weekly Standard published Fred Barnes’s piece that described how President Bush decided on the “surge” strategy for Iraq, and how he sold that strategy to a skeptical Pentagon bureaucracy.

The received wisdom today is that by sending 30,000 more combat troops to Iraq, in the form of five additional Army brigade combat teams and two additional Marine infantry battalions, the U.S. military in Iraq would then have enough manpower to protect the Iraqi population by being able, for the first time, to staff small combat outposts throughout Iraq’s urban neighborhoods. Protecting the population is thought to be an essential counterinsurgency tactic. Once the population sees that the government forces are protecting them against the insurgents, the population will then feel safe enough to give up the rebels hiding in their neighborhoods.

With violence down dramatically and al Qaeda in Iraq now virtually destroyed, few can seriously question the results of Mr. Bush’s dramatic January 2007 decision. But what lessons will future American policymakers learn from this episode?

In Mr. Barnes’s article, he mentions a strategy session that occurred at Camp David in June 2006, after the situation in Iraq had turned for the worse:

To stimulate fresh consideration of Iraq strategy, the NSC staff organized a panel of experts to address the president and his war cabinet at Camp David in mid-June. The two-day meeting at the presidential retreat loomed as a potential turning point in the Bush administration's approach to Iraq.

The four-man panel wasn't stacked. Kagan spoke in favor of additional troops and
outlined his plan for pacifying Baghdad with a "clear, hold, and build" strategy. American soldiers, along with Iraqi troops, would do the holding, living in Baghdad and guarding its citizens, Sunni and Shia alike. Robert Kaplan, the foreign correspondent and military writer now teaching at the Naval Academy, talked about successful counterinsurgency campaigns in the past. (Kaplan's books are among Bush's favorites.) Kaplan neither advocated a troop buildup nor opposed it.

Countering Kagan, Michael Vickers, a former Green Beret and CIA operations officer, explained how Iraq could actually be won with fewer troops, not more. Vickers is now an assistant secretary of defense. The fourth panelist was Eliot Cohen, now a State Department adviser. Bush had read his book on wartime leadership, Supreme Command. Cohen reemphasized its theme: Leaders should hold their generals accountable if a war is being lost or won. [emphasis added]

Mr. Barnes doesn’t explain Mr. Vickers’s proposed strategy. But based on previous statements, along with his background, we can assume that Mr. Vickers proposed working through Iraq’s tribes to achieve American goals in Iraq.

Mr. Bush obviously chose Mr. Kagan’s advice, not Mr. Vickers (although President Bush did appoint Mr. Vickers to be Assistant Secretary of Defense (Special Operation/Low Intensity Conflict)).

To what extent did Mr. Vickers’s vision of how to succeed in Iraq actually prove most important? Here is a task for PhD candidates looking for a dissertation topic. Assess the relative contribution of the following factors when accounting for the sharp reduction in violence in Iraq during 2007:

1. Higher density of U.S. ground combat forces.

2. Establishment of neighborhood “joint security stations” (made possible by #1).

3. Implementation by U.S. forces of the Petreaus-Nagl counterinsurgency manual.

4. Increase in the quantity of Iraqi security forces (ISF) in 2006-2007.

5. Increase in leadership quality in ISF during 2007.

6. Al Qaeda overplays its hand, resulting in a Sunni-Arab backlash.

7. Completion of ethnic cleansing/ethnic partition of the Baghdad area during 2006-2007.

8. American co-option and recruitment of Iraq’s Sunni-Arab tribes, resulting in anti-al Qaeda “Awakening” and “concerned local citizen” militias.

9. Mahdi Army militia overplays its hand in Karbala in August 2007 during a street fight with local police. Moqtada al-Sadr then enters into a unilateral ceasefire.

10. General Iraqi exhaustion with violence.


So who won the war? Mr. Kagan or Mr. Vickers? The U.S. military or the ISF? The ISF or Iraq’s tribes? Or were the main enemies, al Qaeda and the radical Shi’ites, too foolish to win? Or is it something else I neglected to mention?

This question matters not just for the historians but also for future U.S. policymakers. Will the American experience in Iraq be transferrable to future conflicts? Should a future U.S. president turn to Mr. Kagan or Mr. Vickers for advice?