Misremembering the Surge

The Iraq War has been trouble for the GOP presidential field as of late. Former Governor Jeb Bush gave “yes,” “I don’t know,” and “no” answers to the same question over the course of a week, and Senator Marco Rubio—previously a stalwart defender of the invasion—was challenged by Chris Wallace for his abrupt apparent reversal. Now, every candidate is getting a chance to fumble; Ben Carson’s claim he would have removed Saddam “some other way” alone warrants an entire analysis.

Senator Lindsey Graham, however, has attempted to reframe the conversation with a new vision of the war. To the Republican Party, the surge has become the critical piece of the Iraq narrative because it allows them to shift the blame for the region’s current turmoil (and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL) to be shifted from President Bush to President Obama.

Senator Graham articulated this new view in New Hampshire last weekend while pregaming for his coming presidential announcement. To Graham, “Bush made mistakes, [but] he corrected his mistakes” via the surge. Obama, by contrast, bent to political pressure by withdrawing troops prematurely. This narrative of course ignores that Bush’s original “mistakes” constitute the very decision to start the war, but it successfully ropes Obama into the conversation.

This foreign policy jujitsu leaves those on the left to make the more circuitous—though true—argument that the invasion itself, based on poor leadership and faulty intelligence, is the root cause of the region’s current woes. Suddenly, what should be a one-sided conversation, buttressed by the consistently growing majority of Americans who believe the Iraq War was a poor choice to begin with, devolves into just another finger pointing match wherein ‘both sides are probably to blame.’

Graham is doing the entire GOP field a favor in connecting these dots; as an unrepentant fear-monger who once warned that “the world is literally about to blow up,” he has not shied away from cheerleading military action in recent memory. There is a bigger problem, however, with this depiction of the surge. The facts of the policy changes vis-à-vis Iraq in 2007 have been lost to the ages, or more accurately, twisted to vindicate Bush’s past and the GOP field’s collective future.

The surge was, at its core, about more than just increasing the number of American boots on the ground.  Political, economic, and regional objectives all accompanied the shift in military policy, as did the critical outreach to Sunni groups that had previously stayed neutral in the fight or actively supported ISIL’s precursor, Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). Any counterinsurgency theorist can tell you that winning the population’s support—and denying the enemy a sympathetic cover—is key to the military effort.

Political engagement of different socioreligious groups has never been Baghdad’s strong suit, but to make meaningful progress in the fight against ISIL, the central government will have to improve. This is what the White House drives at—albeit perhaps with too much nuance—when discussing a “political solution” to these problems:  defeating ISIL is an effort that fundamentally has to come from inside Iraq. The fact that the surge followed and capitalized on the Anbar Awakening was no mere coincidence; the advent of the latter was a prerequisite, and a key point of leverage, for the former.

It is troubling enough that Republicans are obfuscating questions about the morality and wisdom of the Iraq War. But remembering the surge as an exclusively kinetic panacea is even more dangerous because it feeds the neoconservative worldview that brute force, applied with sufficient strength, can answer any foreign policy challenge. Look for this new narrative to go mainstream as GOPers realize it is a shortcut to avoiding the harder questions about Iraq and placing the blame on their favorite and presumably ever-feckless punching bag.

How we as a nation discuss the Iraq War and remember major policies like the surge will have a significant bearing on how we consider future military interventions. Now more than ever, we must guard against revisionism in the public discourse—especially when an abrupt shift in narrative gets one party out of hot water at the expense of the other.