Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [85]
THE SURGE
In his Princeton Ph.D. dissertation, Petraeus quoted Col. Harry Summers, a noted military commentator, reflecting on the counterinsurgency doctrine devised during the Vietnam era: “Reading it today sounds more like a description of a new liturgy than a discussion of strategic doctrine.” For the U.S. Army and Marine Corps, the manual reviving that liturgy, with the mud from rice paddies wiped clean, now became holy writ.
Tapped by Bush to turn around the failing effort in Iraq, Petraeus took his bible to Baghdad and used it to implement “the surge.” In pulling Iraq back from the abyss, the general vaulted to rock star status, acquiring in Washington a reputation for infallibility not unlike that claimed by the Bishop of Rome.
The cult of personality that soon enveloped Petraeus served to obscure this reality: Despite innumerable claims to the contrary, the campaign he directed in Iraq in 2007–2008 fell well short of success. The surge did avert Iraq’s outright collapse, a not inconsiderable achievement. It also provided a modicum of breathing space for a deeply divided Iraqi political establishment. Yet it did not deliver the promised reconciliation of the various factions vying for power. If it substantially reduced the incidence of terrorist attacks in Baghdad and other cities, violence, targeting both symbols of authority and the civilian population, persisted at levels that would elsewhere have been deemed evidence of impending state failure.
In Baghdad, the New York Times reported, mayhem remained a constant companion, “with attackers able to plant and detonate bombs across the city seemingly with impunity.”21 The surge did weaken the insurgency threatening the Iraqi government. Yet it failed to destroy that insurgency, as Gen. Raymond Odierno, Petraeus’s successor in Baghdad, bluntly acknowledged. Two and a half years after the surge began, a reporter pressed Odierno to say when he expected armed resistance to the Iraqi government finally to subside. “It’s not going to end, OK?” Odierno snapped. “There’ll always be some sort of low-level insurgency in Iraq for the next 5, 10, 15 years.”22
Exactly who or what deserved credit for the gains achieved during Petraeus’s tenure in Baghdad was less clear than the general’s legions of fans let on. In reality, improvements in Iraqi security during the period derived from a complex array of factors. Among them were the increased U.S. troop commitment ordered by President Bush, the abandonment of heavy-handed coalition tactics that alienated Iraqis during the occupation’s first three years, and Iraq’s violent effective partition along ethnic and sectarian lines, largely accomplished prior to Petraeus’s arrival.
Most important of all were the effects of the so-called Sunni Awakening, which Petraeus did not instigate but upon which he shrewdly capitalized. In the wake of the 2003 invasion, Sunni tribal chiefs in the crucially important Anbar Province of western Iraq had forged an anti-American alliance with Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), an especially brutal jihadist movement that the invasion itself had ushered into existence. By September 2006, having concluded that AQI posed a threat to their own authority, the Sunni chieftains called off that alliance, turned on their erstwhile partners, and offered a marriage of convenience to the Americans. In essence, Sunnis who had been in the forefront of the insurgency resisting the American occupation signaled a willingness to be bought. The U.S. military accommodated that request. In another context, this might have been called appeasement. Petraeus’s supporters preferred to call it brilliant.
Meanwhile, Petraeus’s contributions notwithstanding, the larger purposes that had ostensibly impelled the United States to invade Iraq remained unfulfilled. U.S. forces