Notes on the "Surge" in Iraq

“The well-known is such because it is well-known, not known.”
- GWF Hegel

Juan Cole, “A Social History of the Surge,” Informed Comment,
http://www.juancole.com/2008/07/social-history-of-surge.html

Cole notes that there is no clear understanding of what the “surge” actually was, as there is a tendency to conflate a policy of buying-off Sunni insurgents with an escalation of US troop levels. For Cole the “surge” means the latter, while the – policy of buying of Sunni insurgents predates the troop escalation.

He also argues that claims that “the surge worked,” depend on “a possible logical fallacy: post hoc ergo propter hoc. If event X comes after event Y, it is natural to suspect that Y caused X. But it would often be a false assumption.”

In his analysis the cause of the decrease in violence in Iraq in the second part of 2007 was a consequence of Shii militias perpetrating a campaign of ethnic cleansing in Baghdad:

“My thesis would be that the US inadvertently allowed the chasing of hundreds of thousands of Sunni Arabs out of Baghdad (and many of them had to go all the way to Syria for refuge). Rates of violence declined once the ethnic cleansing was far advanced, just because there were fewer mixed neighborhoods.”

He also notes that increasing oil revenue (oil prices peaking in July 2008 @ $145), allowed the Malaki government to strengthen it hand vis-à-vis Iraqi society.

“So did the “surge” “work”? The troop escalation in and of itself was probably not that consequential. That the troops were used in new ways by Gen. Petraeus was more important. But their main effect was ironic. They calmed Baghdad down by accidentally turning it into a Shiite city, as Shiite as Isfahan or Tehran, and thus a terrain on which the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement could not hope to fight effectively.”

A timeline of some of the important developments:

- Feb 2006 Askariya (Shi‘i shrine) bombing in Samarra
- Nov 2006 Iraq Study Report
- Jan 2007 Peak of violence in Iraq
- Jan 2007 Oil price low at $50
- Feb 2007 US troop Escalation begins
- Sep 2007 Sadr cease-fire
- July 2008 Oil prices peak at $145