While our thoughts and prayers are with the victims of Hurricane Gustav, and attention in the media is shifts toward the Republican National Convention, a significant and symbolic development has taken place in Iraq.
Anwar Province in Iraq used to be ground zero for the radical Sunni insurgency, including the birthplace of al Qaeda in Iraq. Anwar has claimed more U.S. lives than anywhere else in the country; over 1,000 U.S. soldiers and marines have perished in the former insurgent hotbed. The bloody Battles of Fallujah were fought in this province. In short, it used to be one of the darkest corners of our vast globe.
Yet two days ago, U.S. forces officially returned authority of the province to the Iraqi army and police. Two years ago, the thought of such a drastic reversal in such a short time frame would have been derided as a pipe dream. This striking image of progress in Anwar further illustrates the remarkable turnaround across the Iraqi board.
The American left-wing has an interesting interpretation of the positive developments on the ground. Julius Caesar once said that people believe what they wish to be true. Psychologists refer to this as confirmation bias. This appears to be the case with the collective Democratic mindset at the moment. The majority of Democrats wish their cut-and-run proposals had been the solution to the Iraq quagmire, and therefore, now believe that the coming troop reductions had been the correct course of action all along. Thus, acknowledgment of success has been tacit if not entirely absent, and one important truth has been omitted from their rhetoric.
I do not doubt that the left has noble and patriotic motives, but many are stubbornly divorced from an important reality: Without the decision made at the highest echelons of the Bush Administration to change the Iraq strategy, and to escalate our troop levels by five combat brigades (20,000 troops)-commonly referred to as “the surge”-the 90 percent reduction in violent attacks we now see would not have come to pass. The surge provided a boon to security, and it bought time for political reconciliation to take place and for the Iraqi security forces to shoulder more of the load. It is now evident that this is exactly what has happened and is still happening. Only because of the successful surge could substantial troop withdrawals finally commence without being rash, apparently to be completed by 2011.
Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Joe Lieberman and others had been pushing the Bush Administration for a troop escalation throughout 2006-2007 as the situation in Iraq looked grim, and they deserve credit and admiration for risking their political futures by making an unpopular judgment call which happened to be in the best interests of our nation. General David Petraeus, Lt. General Ray Odierno, and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, along with the heroic troops and diplomats under their command, will surely go down in history as the highly effective implementers of the President’s correct decision to change course.
To be sure, the troop surge cannot alone explain the about-face of Anwar. Many of the local Sunnis, even former insurgents, grew disillusioned with al Qaeda’s brutal terror tactics, and subsequently reached out to U.S. commanders to fight the extremists jointly. Many Iraqis deserve credit for taking a stand against the radical jihadists in this “Sunni awakening”, and U.S. commanders were right to embrace them.
But both developments-the troop surge and the Sunni awakening-have been indispensable to Anwar’s positive change in fortune, as well as Iraq’s at large. A precipitous withdrawal, for which most Democrats including Senator Obama had been advocating over the past few years, would have resulted in a regional conflagration at worst and dishonor for America at best. The Sunni awakening certainly would not have transpired as there would have been no U.S. forces to which they could have turned for help. To put it simply, al Qaeda would have scored a momentous victory on their central battlefront (and Iran would have been there to fill the vacuum.)
During the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, Secretary of State Colin Powell cautioned President Bush about “the Pottery Barn rule”: You break it, you own it. With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that mistakes were made on our behalf in administering the war-torn Mesopotamia following the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s odious regime. Such is the nature of war, as terrible as it is. But mistakes in times of war do not warrant defeatism, and the Bush Administration wisely heeded Secretary Powell’s advice and did not abandon Iraq; victory was and still is attainable despite our tragic sacrifices in terms of both blood and treasure.
In January of 2007, Senator Obama declared the following on MSNBC: “I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse.” Yet the talking point of the hour is that “Barack Obama was right, and Bush-McCain were wrong” about Iraq and a whole host of other issues.
The hard truth is that most Democrats are failing to acknowledge the crux of the recent success-the troop surge-because they cannot afford to. They already had their minds made up long ago that Iraq was a failure and they subsequently staked so much political capital on the failure of our Mesopotamian misadventure, that the costs are prohibitive for them to now admit to their lapse of judgment. In other words, they would be voted out of office if they were to give credit where credit is actually due. Fortunately, history judges policies based on fact and result and not the opposition’s disingenuous political rhetoric.
Chris Barton is a senior political science and finance double major. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].
