Via CNN: McCain broadens definition of surge

The Arizona senator told reporters Wednesday afternoon that when he refers to the surge, it encompasses not just the January 2007 increase in troop levels but also the counter-insurgency that started in Iraq’s Al Anbar province months prior.

“A surge is really a counter-insurgency strategy, and it’s made up of a number of components,” McCain said. “This counter-insurgency was initiated to some degree by Colonel McFarland in Anbar province, relatively on his own.”

All of this is because

In an interview with CBS’s Katie Couric on Tuesday, McCain said that the surge led U.S. forces to ally with Sunnis, “And it began the Anbar Awakening. I mean, that’s just a matter of history.”

The Obama campaign quickly seized on the discrepancy in the timeline between when the Awakening started and the U.S. later added 30,000 boots on the ground.

While McCain had little choice but to correct his error, I am not sure that he is making all this better for himself. It is true that a variety of changes were made in counter-insurgency policy alongside the increase in troops, but there has been some serious conflation of events, not to mention an impossible causality argument being offered in discussion of these matters.

It almost seems as if McCain wants “surge” to equal “whatever good has happened in the Iraq in the last two years” and oh, by the way, did you know that he was a major proponent of the “surge”?

Beyond that, saying that “[a] surge is really a counter-insurgency strategy, and it’s made up of a number of components” doesn’t make sense. It is pretty clear that the term “surge” has meant an increase in a number of troops, not some specialized term with a lot of complex elements (indeed, it is a shortened form of “troop surge” and the deployment of additional troops to a given theater can be done for any number reasons and is not a common term used to describe counter-insurgency actions–indeed, prior to 2007 it wasn’t a common term at all). I am not saying that there haven’t been a number of elements involved in Iraq, and I am aware of shifts in counter-insurgency policy in the time period in question, but the notion that the term “surge” has been used in that broad a way is a stretch. It stretches credulity, in fact, to try and apply it in any was to the Anbar Awakening.

McCain’s problem is that he has bought into the party line that the reduction in violence in Iraq was all about the surge. There has never been any acknowledgment from the administration that internal displacement of Sunnis, especially within Baghdad might have something to do with the quelling of Sunni-Shi’a fighting. Nor has there been acknowledgment that the Anbar Awakening was not wholly the result of US actions, but part of the evolution of the political and military position of the Sunnis in that area vis-a-vis AQI. Forget all of that, the party line has been: the surge has lowered violence. Now, it is clear that that surge has helped lower violence, but as Matthew Yglesias¹ noted yesterday, the focus of the surge was Baghdad, making the Anbar connection even more problematic:

the surge troops were overwhelmingly sent to increase the level of manpower in Baghdad (i.e., not where the Anbar Awakening happened) and almost certainly (along with a tactical shift to more of a population protection mission) deserves credit for reducing the bloodshed in Baghdad by stabilizing the borders between now-segregated neighborhoods. I’m not sure I would go so far as to say that it had nothing to do what happened in Anbar, but it wasn’t a major factor, and certainly didn’t make anything happen in September 2006.

To be clear: the “Anbar Awakening” took place in middle 2006. The surge started at the beginning of 2007. Indeed, Alex Knapp notes that President Bush used the Anbar Awakening as an argument for sending more troops to Iraq (rather than more troops creating the Awakening) in hisSOTU speech of that year:

Recently, local tribal leaders have begun to show their willingness to take on al Qaeda. And as a result, our commanders believe we have an opportunity to deal a serious blow to the terrorists. So I have given orders to increase American forces in Anbar Province by 4,000 troops. These troops will work with Iraqi and tribal forces to keep up the pressure on the terrorists. America’s men and women in uniform took away al Qaeda’s safe haven in Afghanistan — and we will not allow them to re-establish it in Iraq.

In other words, any arguments that the Anbar Awakening was the result of a response by locals to promises of future troops or that it can any way be retroactively be said to have been caused by the surge is absurd. More accurately, the situation in Anbar became one of the arguments for increased troops in Iraq–and again, most of those 30,000 troops went to Baghdad.

McCain is taking perhaps his main area of strength (the idea that he knows best about Iraq, and that his support for the surge proves it) and seriously damaging it. Couple that with the Maliki government basically endorsing Obama’s plan for troops in Iraq, and one has to say that McCain is having a rough time of it at the moment on the topic of Iraq.

I don’t think it can be emphasized enough: if McCain ends up looking like he doesn’t know what he is talking about on Iraq, he is in real trouble.

1. h/t: Alex Knapp [↩]

Via the BBC: Lesbos locals lose lesbian appeal.

Background here.

Via the BBC: Talabani denounces election law

Iraq’s president has denounced a draft law paving the way for provincial elections, after MPs adopted it despite a walkout by the Kurdish bloc.

President Jalal Talabani, who is himself Kurd, says he is confident the three-member presidential council which he chairs will not approve it.

[...]

Elections were scheduled for 1 October but are now likely to be delayed.

[...]

The Kurds opposed the bill because of objections to clauses about the oil-rich Kirkuk province, which is claimed by both Arabs and Kurds.

While one can make too much of a particular political conflict, it is not insignificant that there is an ongoing difficulty within Iraq to be able to establish the basic elements needed for a fully functional Iraqi state. The fact that over half a decade after the invasion that basic rules for local elections have not been created do not speak well of the process to build democracy in Iraq.

Today’s from-the-campaign-trail-hubbub is the following statement made in a speech yesterday by John McCain:

This is a clear choice that the American people have. I had the courage and the judgment to say I would rather lose a political campaign than lose a war. It seems to me that Obama would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign.

To Time’s Joe Klein this is an especially outrageous statement:

This is the ninth presidential campaign I’ve covered. I can’t remember a more scurrilous statement by a major party candidate. It smacks of desperation. It renews questions about whether McCain has the right temperament for the presidency. How sad.

My reaction to Klein’s assessment is threefold: 1) yes, there is clearly some desperation on the part of the McCain campaign, and this statement does represent something of a doubling-down on the surge, 2) however, it isn’t as if he hasn’t basically been making this argument for a while, and 3) really? the most “scurrilous” statement made by a made party candidate that Klein can remember. Really? ¹

The basic argument that McCain is attempting to make here is as follows: McCain believes that he risked a great deal of political capital supporting the surge to the point that he put his political future on the line. He further believes that Obama knows that the surge worked, but won’t admit it because it would damage his campaign for president. (If one wants to see video of the statement, James Joyner has it).

In regards to the actual debate, two basic thoughts occur.

The Surge. Yes, the violence is significantly down in Iraq at the moment and the surge is part of why this is the case. However, we too easily dismiss the fact that other reasons exit. For example, neighborhoods that were once mixes of Sunni and Shi’a have been homogenized (by violence) and therefore some of the basis of the fighting was removed. Further, the Anbar Awakening started before the surge began (i.e., the surge didn’t cause the Anbar Awkening). Beyond that, to focus too much on Sunni tribal leaders rejecting AQI is to miss the point that the violence of most signifiance was Sunni v. Shi’a, not US/Iraq v. AQI (something that is too frequently conflated in this discussion). In other words, there is a multivariate equation here, and to reduce it to one policy action is to grandly oversimplify.

So yes, the surge helped quell the violence, but it was not the sole reason for the quelling. Beyond that, there is legitimate room for criticism of the policy in the sense that the stated reason for the surge was to create political space for the Iraqi government to solve an array of pressing problems. On that point, it is unclear that there has been substantial progress.

However, all of the above is preface and context to my basic point about the the surge, which is that to listen to the debate (including McCain’s new sound bite) about Iraq these days one would think that the entire war is to be understood almost solely in terms of the surge. It is as if the notion is if the surge can be said to have worked that that somehow confirms the policy. However, the bottom line is that the surge was a specific tactical move in response to one element of the broader policy. It is not the totality of policy on Iraq and we cannot evaluate all things Iraq based solely on the surge, regardless of what one thinks about it.

Defining Victory. While it is presented as a simple dichotomy between winning and losing, the honest fact of the matter is that it isn’t all that simple to know what “victory” or “defeat” will look like going forward. One can easily imagine glowing, happy victory wherein all is stable and wonderful and Iraq becomes a wholly functional democratic state that acts as a stabilizing influence on the region. One can likewise think of deepest, darkest defeat wherein in the Iraqi state collapses into chaos. While at the moment neither seems to be happening, the fact of the matter is that the darkest defeat scenario is still more likely that the glowing victory one.

Even setting aside those more extreme possibilities, I am curious as to how the candidates, especially McCain, define the concepts of “victory” and “defeat.” Aside from the obvious fact that winning is better than losing, it is unclear as to what these things are supposed to actually mean. One has to concede that apart from toppling Saddam, it is hard to say that any of our actual goals in Iraq (most specifically WMD-related issues) have come to fruition. At the moment “victory” seems to mean quelling violence that would not have existed had we not invaded in the first place. This is hardly a rousing version of “victory” to rally around.

1. I will confess that I an immediate counterexample doesn’t spring to mind, but still. [↩]

Greg Weeks has the shorter version of their statement.

Via Reuters: Colombian rightists want third term for Uribe

“We plan to introduce the bill before September, once we have gathered 5 million signatures supporting the referendum,” said Sen. Carlos Garcia, head of the Party of National Social Unity which backs Uribe and is know as “Partido de la U”.

Supporters have gathered 3.5 million signatures so far and the idea of a third term for the strong-willed conservative leader has won growing support in recent months.

While a logistical challenge, I suspect that the additional 1.5 million signatures can be gathered. The question, then, will be whether Congress will go along.

To understand what is going on here, it should be noted that in Article 155 of the Colombian constitution, if at least 5% of the citizens (as measured by the current electoral census) support a constitutional reform, it is to be sent to Congress for consideration.

The real question will be if the Congress is willing to endorse the proposal and send it along to the voters in the form of a referendum. Both chambers of congress lack a majority party, so any vote would require coalition building. However, both chambers can be said to be controlled by blocs of pro-Uribe parties (the aforementioned la U plus the Conservatives (PC), Cambio Radical, the Citizens’ Convergence Party, to name the largest in terms of seats). These parties all supported Uribe in 2006 and therefore are likely pre-supposed to support a third term. The question is whether the ambitious politicians in these groups really want to stay in Uribe’s shadow another four years.

The party within the coalition that I wonder the most about is the PC, as for them to acquiesce to a Uribe third term is to contribute to their continued marginalization within Colombian politics (they were once one of two main parties). Of course, since they haven’t offered a candidate under their own label since 1990, that ship may have already sailed¹.

The article does note that some in Uribe’s coalition are skeptical of the idea:

Opposition lawmakers and some members of Uribe’s own coalition fear that a third term would allow him to dominate Congress, the courts and the central bank, disturbing the balance of power.

It specifically quotes a PC lawmaker who is distancing himself from the project (and his party?) by pegging the whole thing on la U:

“There is no guarantee the referendum bill will pass Congress, especially if Uribe does not come out and say he wants it,” said Santiago Castro, a long-time Uribe supporter from the Conservative Party and member of the lower house.

“Partido de la U is the only party that has committed to the project,” Castro said. “The rest of us still have not.”

I have been on record as being skeptical about an Uribe third term, and I certainly think that it would be an unhealthy move for Colombian democracy. Still, the notion has had stronger legs than I would have imagined a few years back. It will be most fascinating to see what happens to the Uribista bloc in the Congress should the requisite signatures be gathered.

1. They can technically claim Andrés Pastrana, who served fromk 1998-2002, but he didn’t technically run as a conservative [↩]

The CSM: Picking a No. 2 in the glare of the Internet age

James Joyner notes that the Evans-Novak Political Report is predicting a veep-pick by McCain this week with Mitt Romney at the head of the list. Speculation about Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal is seen to be at the top of the list as well.

Jonathan Martin at the Politico is a little more cautious about a reveal this week:

John McCain has narrowed his vice-presidential possibilities to the point where he considered a decision this week — but he’s likely to hold off, say sources close to the campaign.

He provides additional names to the list:

Other potential candidates include former Ohio congressman and OMB director Rob Portman, a favorite of Bush loyalists, South Dakota Sen. John Thune, a reliable conservative and potential compromise pick, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and Florida Gov. Charlie Crist. Former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge and Conneticut Sen. Joe Lieberman are also prospects, but Ridge supports abortion rights and Lieberman, though elected an independent, hews to the Democratic line on that issue and others.

It would seem, however, that Romeny and Jindal are the frontrunners for the position at this time, and both seem to be popular with the GOP base. However, if McCain is in a position where his veep picked is needed to shore up his base, that is a sign of weakness. Surely, the veep selection at this point should be done either to broaden his appeal in the general electorate, to bring a strategic electoral advantage or with an eye towards working together in government. I don’t see either Jindal or Romney doing the first two, and Romney for sure isn’t on the list for the third, as he and McCain don’t get along. The degree to which Jindal is considered an asset for governance by the McCain camp is an open question.

I remain perplexed by Romney’s appeal to the conservative base of the party, as his long-term record is not one of solid conservatism as it is usually defined (indeed, as James notes in regards to Romney’s popularity with conservatives: “I still haven’t figured out why, exactly, that’s the case with the more-moderate-than-McCain Romney”).

Jindal has an impressive resume, but I have my doubts that he ultimately helps McCain. For one thing, his youth with simply emphasize McCain’s age–they will look like Gramps and Junior on the stump and I don’t see how that is useful to McCain. Second, if part of the argument against Obama is his lack of foreign policy experience, how is picking a veep with the same problem a supportable move? Third, Jindal’s exorcism won’t be wonderful PR (but SNL will love it, not doubt).

Via Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber is a nice site to make “word clouds” and the nifty idea of making one from a book manuscript. Here’s one made from my forthcoming (so they tell), Voting Amid Violence: Electoral Democracy in Colombia (click for the full-sized image):

Henry has one of his forthcoming book, The Political Economy of Trust: Institutions, Interests and Inter-Firm Cooperation.

Via the BBC:Parrots throng Indian temple (video).