Ever since my friend and mentor Tom Ricks concluded at the end of his book The Gamble that the Surge succeeded tactically but failed strategically, it has been safe among others to say that the Surge -- for all the heroics of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps -- failed. Andrew Sullivan and Tom write this regularly on their blogs, and because they are serious people, others parrot what they say. At some point, though, evidence gets in the way of their conclusion.
If you really move the goal posts, defining up "success" as the Surge having not only reduced levels of violence and addressed immediate drivers of conflict but having also managed to fix all the problems in Iraq's political process, then yeah, it failed. But I don't recall that ever being the aim of the operation in 2007, and I don't think it's reasonable to expect the U.S. military and its friends in the diplomatic corps to be able to settle the political affairs of a host nation. That's not what a military does, and I am known for having a pretty expansive definition of what militaries should be expected to do on the battlefield. â??We intervene in â?¦ a conflict,â? Gen. Sir Rupert Smith wrote in 2005, â??in order to establish a condition in which the political objective can be achieved by other means and in other ways. We seek to create a conceptual space for diplomacy, economic incentives, political pressure and other measures to create a desired political outcome of stability, and if possible democracy.â?
So how has the U.S. military and its partners done in carving out that conceptual space Sir Rupert writes about? Well, let's take a look at the numbers:
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