John McCain has made much of how he was correct about the Surge in Iraq when his opponent was saying it wouldn’t work. Barack Obama has been moving gradually further towards McCain’s position, propelled there by a narrative that questions his original judgement in the face of drastic cuts in Iraqi violence which have popularly been ascribed to the Surge. He’s now at the point of saying it “succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.”
But how close to reality are McCain and Obama’s positions? Well, for a start it’s unclear that it’s actually the Surge that has been instrumental in lowering Iraqi violence (to parity with some of the world’s bloodiest conflicts instead of being in a class of its own). The Sunni Awakening and a ceasefire by the Shiite Sadrist movement must also take a large part of the credit and, despite McCain’s attempt at rewriting history, both pre-dated the Surge. Indeed, even General Petraeus admits the possibility that, due to these entirely local developments, violence in Iraq might have fallen just as much even without the Surge.
Paying the Awakening movement some $30 million a month to not attack US troops wasn’t originally a part of the Surge plan that McCain backed and it’s unlikely he would have supported such a move in any case. John McCain has made much of Barack Obama’s supposed wish for “appeasement” of terrorists in negotiating with Iran or Hamas - how much worse is it then to bring terrorists onto the payroll? Many of the Awakening’s so-called Sons of Iraq were previously members of the insurgency.
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