The Crossed Pond

I think that the Bush surge has actually been more effective than I would have predicted at the outset at at least mitigating some of the chaos in Iraq. On some level, of course, how could it not? Tens of thousands of more United States troops hitting the ground in Iraq is of course going to abate outright insurgency in the places where it’s focused. It would be pretty amazing for that to not happen. But still, Petraeus deserves credit for focusing things well.

The question, however, and the question that’s been there from the beginning, is how good it’s going to do, and how sustainable it is. On the latter, there’s going to be a gradual withdraw whether the GOP wants one or not. Bush has already noted that. It’s not a sign of victory or failure, simply a fact of logistics. On the former, though, the question is and always has been how much military work can accomplish what needs to be accomplished politically, and that remains an open question. Security (of some fashion) is, of course, a necessary but not sufficient condition for any political reconciliation in Iraq. But when it comes from Americans, it also entails a tradeoff, that is instantiating a system where American military presence (again, unsustainably) is itself a necessary but not sufficient condition for security. To say that Americans are required for security is both true and a bit of a dangerously mis-directed premise. Americans are right now required for security, but ultimately, for any long term security, Iraqis are either going to be interested and able to provide for their own security, or they’re not (either being unable, or unable to effectively, or just as likely, uninterested, drawn instead to playing out their sectarian psycho-military-dramas), and American hen-sitting doesn’t have much of an effect on this one way or the other save buying a little more time for hopefully a solution to that question to spontaneously generate itself (which might, for all we know, be just as likely to happen in our absence and in our presence; nothing begs for security quite like having to deal with your problems yourself; civil wars are rarely solved by an interventionist refereeing, unless it comes at an otherwise opportune moment, so much as being played out one way or the other).

But the real question of the surge is to what end are we using it?

To wit, a nice reader email over at Sullivan, asking the right questions:

I don’t have any doubt – and really, never did – that increasing the use of (and apparently, more properly deploying) American troops would reduce violence in Iraq. And I think that although Bush did this belatedly and only in response to political pressure he deserves (along with Gates and Petraeus) to be applauded for that.

But what does that have to do with the goals of the war?

As I understand it, we don’t have a military goal – we have a hope that the Iraqis are able to put together a democratic government that is capable of unifying and securing the country. That has nothing to do with whether there is a lot or not a lot of violence in Iraq.

Remember, we started out with a specific military objective – remove the Hussein regime. We hoped that if we achieved this military objective, the Iraqis would put together a democratic government that could unify and secure the country. We achieved the objective, but the Iraqis did not fulfill our hopes. Now, instead of a military objective, we have a military activity – maintaining security.

Or if you want, say that we have a “military objective” – reducing violence. It doesn’t matter, really. Again, we hope that if we do a good job of maintaining security/reducing violence the Iraqis will put together a democratic government that can unify and secure the country.

Again, there’s not the slightest reason in the world to think that the Iraqis will fulfill our hopes.

I’d depart a bit from the tone of the reader, in that there’s no real reason to think, I guess, that the Iraqis won’t fulfill our hopes…well, unless you could all available empirical evidence to date…so yeah, okay, there IS a reason to think that. But still, like I said, I don’t think a window of security is, at least on its face, a BAD thing to this end.

But it gets back to the original question at the heart of the entire Iraq war. Can a military intervention, in this instance, achieve, just by virtue of its existence, a fundamental political realignment not just of the legal structure of a country, but of its very character?

Again, it’s possible, I believe; I don’t dismiss that out of hand.

But from the beginning, it’s hard to call that a concrete blueprint or even an objective (in the operational sense of it) so much as us pinning everything on an unsubstantiated hope, or worse yet an abstract egghead theory. Throwing a bunch of soldiers and money at a random hope seems a pretty poor way of conducting the world’s largest current military occupation.