That’s what John McCain is saying about his stance on Iraq, and the consistency with which he’s been calling for more troops from the beginning. And he’s right, he has.
The problem is, I remain unconvinced that more troops were the answer, then, or now. I always thought that the surge was misnamed. I think that there are two other factors that are as important, and perhaps much more important, than troop levels per se.
First was the change of tactics, in which rather than hunkering down in bases and training Iraqis to go out and fight the insurgency, Petraeus put the troops out in the field and worked with the locals.
But I think that the most important factor was simply that the Iraqis tired of the insurgency and Al Qaeda. I think that Petraeus was the right man at the right time, but I don’t think that it takes anything away from him to question how well the strategy would have worked two, or three years ago. It probably would have been better than what we were doing at the time, but I think that the time had to be ripe for the awakenings in Anbar and Diyala, and now in Baghdad. It may be that the Iraqis simply had to go through this brutal period to understand the barbarity and viciousness of the fundamentalists that were attempting to colonize them, as they had Afghanistan under the Taliban, and the benefits of working with Americans and each other, rather than trying to fight each other for the spoils of the war.
The Sunnis are probably finally coming to the realization that they are never going to rule over the majority as they had under the Ba’athists, and seem to now be ready to accommodate themselves to the new Iraq, and are trying to cut deals. Again, I don’t think that’s something that could have happened overnight.
I don’t think that it was ever realistic to think that we were going to get a well-functioning democracy quickly in Iraq, even if we managed to get votes much more quickly than most predicted. Anyone who has studied military history knows that wars, and insurrections, are generally long protracted periods of one disaster after another, until one side finally throws in the towel. World War II was a series of bloody blunders, in both theaters, but we had the will and the resources to continue on regardless until the enemy was finally defeated. That’s why I was never as critical of Bush and Rumsfeld as many were. Not to say I think the decisions flawless, but sometimes things have to happen at their own pace, regardless of tactics. The only wars that America has lost are those in which it got tired, and gave up.
One fears that the attention-deficit, teevee-remote, video-game generation won’t have the patience to win the long war against our new ideological enemy, which is likely to continue for decades, as our war against totalitarian communism did. But give the president credit for standing firm in the face of the surrender demands of the Democrats after the election. I think that history, however else it judges him, will be kind to him in that regard, and less so to the Reids and Pelosis.
We’ll never know, of course, if more troops or better tactics would have gotten us to this point sooner, though if we have to do something similar in the future, we may take some lessons from Iraq, and try it. But history doesn’t really allow controlled experiments. In any event, while Senator McCain can be praised for consistency, it remains unobvious to me that his prescriptions would have been as effective at the time as he wants to claim now.