"Breathing space"
Earlier today, on Meet the Press, Thomas Ricks - the Washington Post's Pentagon correspondent and author of two books about the war in Iraq - said: "the surge succeeded militarily and failed politically."
This is tantamount to saying that the surge failed, and for reasons similar to the overall failure of the Iraq war. Nobody ever denied that the US could achieve military successes in Iraq. The problem has always been a matter of managing the aftermath of military success.
The whole rationale for the surge was political - the idea was to mount a military operation that would provide a certain degree of stability and order, so that political reconciliation and progress emerge and take hold.
The so-called surge did indeed achieve its military objectives. A certain degree of stability and order were in fact created. And yet, Ricks quotes General Odierno as stating that the Iraqis used the "breathing space" created by the surge in order "to step backwards, to become more sectarian, to become more divided."
To say that the surge succeeded militarily is to say, more or less, nothing. In the absence of political progress, the surge cannot be argued to be anything other than a failure.
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This is tantamount to saying that the surge failed, and for reasons similar to the overall failure of the Iraq war. Nobody ever denied that the US could achieve military successes in Iraq. The problem has always been a matter of managing the aftermath of military success.
The whole rationale for the surge was political - the idea was to mount a military operation that would provide a certain degree of stability and order, so that political reconciliation and progress emerge and take hold.
The so-called surge did indeed achieve its military objectives. A certain degree of stability and order were in fact created. And yet, Ricks quotes General Odierno as stating that the Iraqis used the "breathing space" created by the surge in order "to step backwards, to become more sectarian, to become more divided."
To say that the surge succeeded militarily is to say, more or less, nothing. In the absence of political progress, the surge cannot be argued to be anything other than a failure.