How the Surge Worked

[ganeil]

From yesterday's NY Times:

Back in Iraq, Jarred by the Calm

BAGHDAD — At first, I didn’t recognize the place.

On Karada Mariam, a street that runs over the Tigris River toward the Green Zone, the Serwan and the Zamboor, two kebab places blown up by suicide bombers in 2006, were crammed with customers. Farther up the street was Pizza Napoli, the Italian place shut down in 2006; it, too, was open for business. And I’d forgotten altogether about Abu Nashwan’s Wine Shop, boarded up when the black-suited militiamen of the Mahdi Army had threatened to kill its owners. There it was, flung open to the world.

Two years ago, when I last stayed in Baghdad, Karada Mariam was like the whole of the city: shuttered, shattered, broken and dead.

Abu Nawas Park — I didn’t recognize that, either. By the time I had left the country in August 2006, the two-mile stretch of riverside park was a grim, spooky, deserted place, a symbol for the dying city that Baghdad had become.

These days, the same park is filled with people: families with children, women in jeans, women walking alone. Even the nighttime, when Iraqis used to cower inside their homes, no longer scares them. I can hear their laughter wafting from the park. At sundown the other day, I had to weave my way through perhaps 2,000 people. It was an astonishing, beautiful scene — impossible, incomprehensible, only months ago.

When I left Baghdad two years ago, the nation’s social fabric seemed too shredded to ever come together again. The very worst had lost its power to shock. To return now is to be jarred in the oddest way possible: by the normal, by the pleasant, even by hope. The questions are jarring, too. Is it really different now? Is this something like peace or victory? And, if so, for whom: the Americans or the Iraqis?
....

[solefald]

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Satell...urce_0919.html

A study of the Pentagon's satellite imagery concludes that ethnic cleansing -- not last year's surge of U.S. military forces -- is the main factor in the reduction of violence in Iraq.

The report's conclusion about the surge's ineffectiveness are supported by many Iraq experts and international organizations who credit a population shift with the decline of sectarian violence, especially in Baghdad, Reuters reported.

Conducted by the University of California, the study analyzed the use of nighttime light across Baghdad and how it changed before, during and after the surge. It's findings show only some neighborhoods have higher levels of output, suggesting the others had been ethnically cleansed before the surge.

"By the launch of the surge, many of the targets of conflict had either been killed or fled the country, and they turned off the lights when they left," geography professor John Agnew of the University of California Los Angeles, who led the study, said in a statement.

"Essentially, our interpretation is that violence has declined in Baghdad because of intercommunal violence that reached a climax as the surge was beginning," said Agnew, who studies ethnic conflict.

In other words, ethnic violence did the job before American soldiers got the chance.

Sectarian violence between Baghdad's neighborhoods has been documented by an independent commission that correlates with much of the report's findings.

But FP Passport, a foreign policy blog, offered several caveats to its conclusion. For example, the blog asks why there were also security improvements outside the capital in places such as Anbar province?

Republican presidential nominee John McCain has long criticized his opponent Sen. Barack Obama for not having backed the surge, which McCain boasts as the single factor in the reduction of violence.

CNN Security Analyst Peter Bergen disagrees.

"...[b]oth the Democrats and the Republicans have been overemphasizing the surge. If it was just about the surge, the violence would be back up again because the surge is over."

In a speech last July, McCain said, "It is precisely the success of the surge in Iraq that shows us the way to succeed in Afghanistan," but one country has very little to do with the other, Slate.com reported.

A recent military analysis posits that a surge of troops in Afghanistan, where rising violence has drawn the attention of U.S. forces, will not succeed. The article contends U.S. military leaders do not adequately understand the country's situation.

Which is exactly what the study of ethnic cleansing suggested about commanders in Iraq.

The first sentence of the University of California's summary, written by co-author Thomas Gillespie, says this:

"Geographers and social scientists find it increasingly difficult to intervene in debates about vital matters of public interest, such as the Iraq war, because of the ideological polarization and lack of respect for empirical analysis that have afflicted US politics in recent years."

[ganeil]

From today's Washington Post:

Another Iraq Benchmark
Legislators approve a crucial deal on provincial elections.

Friday, September 26, 2008; A22

WHILE WASHINGTON was seized with congressional negotiations over the Wall Street bailout, Iraq's parliament on Wednesday took another major step toward political stabilization. By a unanimous vote, the national legislature approved a plan for local elections in 14 of 18 provinces by early next year -- clearing the way for a new, more representative and more secular wave of politicians to take office. The legislation eliminates the party slate system that allowed religious authorities to dominate Iraq's previous elections, and it provides for women to hold 25 percent of seats. Most important, it will allow Sunni leaders who boycotted the 2005 provincial elections -- and who have since allied themselves with U.S. forces against al-Qaeda in Iraq -- to compete for political power in the provinces that were once the heartland of the insurgency.
...
Democrat Barack Obama continues to argue that only the systematic withdrawal of U.S. combat units will force Iraqi leaders to compromise. Yet the empirical evidence of the past year suggests the opposite: that only the greater security produced and guaranteed by American troops allows a political environment in which legislative deals and free elections are feasible.