Is the Surge Working? Posted by Michael Cohen

I really like Matt Yglesias's blog so I feel kind of bad picking on him twice in one week, but he strikes me as the kind of guy who is not such a fragile flower that he can't handle a little push back.

Yesterday Matt cited a new Pew Center poll, which indicates that a) press coverage of Iraq has declined and b) American's knowledge of the number of troops killed these has also fallen, From these initially depressing statistics Yglesias draws the conclusion that the surge is working.

Controlling the information landscape is key, because the public continues to have mixed feelings about the underlying issue. People think the war was a mistake, and think it hasn't been worth the costs. But rather than quit right now, the median voter seems to want to let things play out for a little while longer. The challenge for people who want to end the war is to make people see that that's not a viable option -- that the real policy choices are between leaving in as quickly a way as is safe and practical or else staying for many years. The challenge for those who want to see the war continue indefinitely is to obscure the length of commitment they're talking about, and to obscure the ongoing costs of an open-ended U.S. military presence in Iraq. Judged by those standards, the surge is working pretty well.

That strikes me as a pretty rational way to view the situation, but I'm not convinced - and I hark back to some poll numbers I posted on last month.

In February, CNN asked Americans whether they favor or oppose the war in Iraq – 34% favor, 64% oppose. The same question was asked in June 2007, well before the security situation began to improve – and the numbers are exactly the same. Indeed, they have been remarkably consistent from month to month. One would imagine that with stories of improved security in Iraq and the conservative meme that success in Iraq is just around the corner these numbers would have seen a bump – but it simply hasn’t happened.

How about President Bush’s approval on Iraq. It was 28% in January 2007 when the surge was announced. Today, it has risen a statistically insignificant blip to 33%. Was it worth going into Iraq? According to an ABC/Washington Poll taken in January 2007, 40% said yes; today the number stands at 34%. And in probably the most important question as it relates to the 2008 election – should the US withdraw troops right away, within a year or should we stay in Iraq as long it takes to win the war.  Again, unchanged. Overwhelmingly, the American people want the troops either out now or out within a year.

What’s even more interesting is that Americans are quite aware of the improved security situation. According to a Newsweek poll, since August, the number of Americans who think that things are getting better in Iraq has nearly doubled -- but they don’t really seem to care. Their basic opinions on the war remain unchanged. The American people have made up their minds. They think the war in Iraq was a mistake; they disapprove of the current policy and they want the troops to come home.

With the public's mind largely made up about the war this most recent Pew poll should hardly seem surprising. In fact, you can lump me in with the great American body politic. I find myself spending less and less time reading the daily reports out of Iraq. It's not because I don't care, but it's because I view the war as a lost cause. My focus is far less on what is happening in Iraq, but how we get the troops home. In my view, the fundamental narrative of the war is unchanged and I can't imagine anything that I will read on a daily basis is going to change my mind. Now I can't get inside the heads of every American, but I wouldn't be shocked if many of them feel the exact same way.

Comments

[Don Bacon]

You could only find two things to disagree with Yglesias about?

It's well known that poll results differ depending on what questions are asked as they relate to political positions. The "true patriots" talk about in stark terms about war and victory while the "surrender monkeys" speak of diplomacy and withdrawal. Ask a citizen if we should "win the war" and you increase the possibility of a positive answer, and so on. Who is against victory?

The situation in Iraq is not in fact a war at all. The US won the war shortly after it invaded. General Garner's view was: We won -- let's get out and turn it over to the Iraqis. But Garner was relieved and the US went with Jerry Bremer and an unending oppressive military occupation resisted by Iraqis, primarily Sunnis and Sadrists. Of course people don't like an oppressive foreign military occupier particularly when there are religious issues.

So asking Americans about how they feel about winning the war in Iraq is a bogus question, and the answers have no meaning. If the question were: Do you favor wasting more American lives and spending more hundreds of billions of dollars to occupy and defend a new Islamic Republic which discriminates against women and is closely aligned with Iran? no doubt the poll results would be different.

The bottom line is that is doesn't matter what the American people think. That was proven shortly after the last election.

[blgphd]

Maybe Americans haven't changed their minds about wanting to get out of Iraq but it is no longer the big issue. If we don't read about it in the papers- in today's NYTimes the only article I could find was the daily box with the names of the dead - and every article that does come up in the national press will say something like- "in spite of" X number of people killed by a bomb today the surge is a success, and violence is down. The surge is not a success the spin is.

[David Tomlin]

I don't think 'get out and turn it over to the Iraqis' was a real option, because 'turn it over to the Iraqis' meant the Iraqi exiles, who weren't particularly popular. They would have needed American bayonets to keep them in power.

I think Garner, and the military, were planning on cutting troop strength in Iraq to about half the size of the invasion force, and had no definite plans after that.

This option is called 'ending the occupation' because theoretically the troops would be there at the invitation of the sovereign government (as has now been the case for some years). It's misleading to describe it as 'get out'.

[Don Bacon]

DT: I think Garner, and the military, were planning on cutting troop strength in Iraq to about half the size of the invasion force, and had no definite plans after that.

What you think is wrong.

news report:
Jay Garner, the US general abruptly dismissed as Iraq's first occupation administrator after a month in the job, says he fell out with the Bush circle because he wanted free elections and rejected an imposed programme of privatisation.

In an interview to be broadcast on BBC Newsnight tonight, he says: "My preference was to put the Iraqis in charge as soon as we can, and do it with some form of elections ... I just thought it was necessary to rapidly get the Iraqis in charge of their destiny."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/mar/18/iraq.usa

[David Tomlin]

Sorry, I misunderstood you to be saying that Garner supported the neo-con plan for handing sovereignty immediately to an interim government.

I looked at my notes from Larry Diamond's _Squandered Victory_. According to Diamond, Garner had a four-month plan, with sovereignty to be handed to an elected government in August of 2003.

In the interview you linked, Garner says nothing about withdrawing Coalition forces.

The elected government would be predominately Shi'ite, and might still want to disband the Sunni-dominated security forces and rely on Coalition forces for a time. Bremer always claimed (self-servingly, of course) that disbanding the military was popular with the Shi'ites.

[Don Bacon]

And now back to our regularly scheduled blog subject.

Whether or not the surge is "working" it's time to call a halt to Operation Iraqi Fiasco, which a proper poll, one not part of the "spin" that blgphd mentions, would indicate. I posed one poll question above which might be used, here's another: "On January 8th SecDef Gates said: 'Over the past year, Iraqi security forces have grown in capability, confidence and size, expanding by more than a hundred thousand. Iraqis have assumed security responsibility for nine of 18 provinces, and we expect this transfer to continue.' The question is: With all this new organic Iraqi military capability, don't you think that the withdrawal of US troops should be accelerated?"

[reasonsjester]

Commiserating about events long past leads to apathy and myopathy, and does little to solve problems in the present. All your animus and hostility toward Bush can be loaded onto a great big dump-truck or "who gives a shit?," driven to "get over it" turnpike, and dumped in the river of "waste of breath and time." Calling for an immediate pullout of "the lost cause" Iraq will only prompt an influx of terrorists into the power vacuum (I know you liberals would like to plug "happy thoughts" into this power vacuum, but history shows that troops are more successful). In any event, a call for retreat is equivalent to a call for genocide. There are consequences in the world, and there is a concept called "responsibility" that juvenile libs are reticent to apprehend. The U.S., in an immediate pullback from Iraq, would trigger a "spate" of sectarian violence - leaving hundreds and thousands of people dead and mutilated. Yes, these are real people, people who live and breathe as surely as you do, people who don't enjoy murderous tyrannical regimes like the one under Hussein, and who don't enjoy being the playground for depraved inhuman terrorists. I know this is hard for you to gather, that Iraqis are human beings too, but there it is. The U.S. pulling back from Iraq will lead to more deaths from terrorists. But I know what you're asking yourselves. How can there be terrorists without seemingly omnipresent American oppression? If a terrorist detonates a bomb without American oppression, does it kill a mother? If a tyrannical madman locks a child in one of his prisons, does his cries make a sound? I assure you on both counts that they do. So you can continue to relive the glory days of being indignant and outraged at the concept of war and continue your conflation of the U.S. with worldwide injustice, but as for me, I will honor the American men and women that put and end to a homicidal regime and who are defeating inhumane terrorists where they can be found.

[Carlos Navarro]

Surge or no Surge, these nagging questions remain:

What gives the United States the legal and moral right to go out in the world, uninvited, and intervene in the affairs of other nations Isn't it the only role of our Armed Forces to protect OUR nation and her interests?

Once we found that Saddam Hussein had not weapons of mass destruction, why didn’t gather our troops and go home?

And now that we are stuck there, what, exactly, do the war hawks mean by “winning”? We deposed Saddam Hussein, hanged him by proxy, got the Iraqis to hold democratic elections, helped them form a parliamentary government, reconstituted Hussein’s Sunni Republican Guard and enlisted them to battle the enemy—So, haven’t we won already. ?

And who, exactly, is or are the enemy? Al Qaeda, insurgents, international terrorists, Muslim radicals, Iranian agents? All the above? Small wonder McCain is confused.

And what do the war hawks mean when they argue that if we don’t “defeat them there, we’ll have to fight them here.” Does the enemy really have the means and resources to invade and occupy the United States? Don’t they operate in small terrorists cells armed with low-tech devices? Weren’t the 9/11 terrorists already here, legally, for years, on student visas? Doesn’t history show that a small group of fanatics is all it takes to terrorize a nation of millions? (Recall how effective the John Muhammad and Lee Malvo, the "Beltway Snipers, they terrorized with nothing but an old car and a hunting rifle.) Moreover, how do we expect to win the heart and minds of the Iraqi people when they hear that we intend to keep fighting our foe “over there” in their neighborhoods?

Wouldn't the billions of dollars spent waging war against a faceless enemy be better spent creating jobs here in America?

Are the 4,000 American soldiers thus far killed and the 20,000 physically maimed or mentally scarred for life--not to mention the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi casualties--worth the sacrifice?

I have two sons of military age. If a foreign army were at our borders aiming to invade us, I would tell them, unequivocally, that they are duty-bound to enlist in some branch of the Armed Forces and defend the nation. But it they were drafted as cannon fodder for an Iraq-type war, I would send them off to the nearest neutral country in a heart beat.

[Carlos Navarro]

Surge or no Surge, these nagging questions remain:

What gives the United States the legal and moral right to go out in the world, uninvited, and intervene in the affairs of other nations? Isn't it the only role of our Armed Forces to protect OUR nation and her interests?

Once we found that Saddam Hussein had not weapons of mass destruction, why didn’t gather our troops and go home?

And now that we are stuck there, what, exactly, do the war hawks mean by “winning”? We deposed Saddam Hussein, hanged him by proxy, got the Iraqis to hold democratic elections, helped them form a parliamentary government, reconstituted Hussein’s Sunni Republican Guard and enlisted them to battle the enemy—So, haven’t we won already. ?

And who, exactly, is or are the enemy? Al Qaeda, insurgents, international terrorists, Muslim radicals, Iranian agents? All the above? Small wonder McCain is confused.

And what do the war hawks mean when they argue that if we don’t “defeat them there, we’ll have to fight them here.” Does the enemy really have the means and resources to invade and occupy the United States? Don’t they operate in small terrorists cells armed with low-tech devices? Weren’t the 9/11 terrorists already here, legally, for years, on student visas? Doesn’t history show that a small group of fanatics is all it takes to terrorize a nation of millions? (Recall how effective the John Muhammad and Lee Malvo, the "Beltway Snipers, they terrorized with nothing but an old car and a hunting rifle.) Moreover, how do we expect to win the heart and minds of the Iraqi people when they hear that we intend to keep fighting our foe “over there” in their neighborhoods?

Wouldn't the billions of dollars spent waging war against a faceless enemy be better spent creating jobs here in America?

Are the 4,000 American soldiers thus far killed and the 20,000 physically maimed or mentally scarred for life--not to mention the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi casualties--worth the sacrifice?

I have two sons of military age. If a foreign army were at our borders aiming to invade us, I would tell them, unequivocally, that they are duty-bound to enlist in some branch of the Armed Forces and defend the nation. But it they were drafted as cannon fodder for an Iraq-type war, I would send them off to the nearest neutral country in a heart beat.