Since the spring of 2007, violence in Iraq has dramatically decreased. George W. Bush and John McCain point to the military "Surge" that began in the summer of 2007 as the one and only reason for this welcome development. They never mention any other possible reasons. But that doesn't mean there aren't several other reasons, which have been, in fact, far more important to the current state of affairs in Iraq than the insertion of an additional 20,000 U.S. troops to this volatile country.

Sectarian Cleansing
According to the International Red Crescent relief agency, over two million people have fled Iraq since the war began. Tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of Iraqis have been killed by the sectarian violence between the Sunnis, Shias and Kurds that make up the highly conflicted nation of Iraq. At its height, the violence of sectarian cleansing was as great in Iraq as it was in Bosnia in the 1990s. With neighborhoods being cleared of religious minority families (Shias in Sunni neighborhoods; Sunnis in Shia neighborhoods), mosques being bombed by sectarian factions, as well as by trouble-making Al Qaeda types (primarily foreigners) who were happy to blow up or behead anyone, virtually the entire country descended into a bonafide civil war. That war flared viciously from shortly after the occupation of Iraq in 2003 until the spring of 2007.

Now the civil war seems to have abated to a large degree. And why not? The neighorhoods have been cleared. Over two million have left. Thousands are dead. Sporadic killing continues, but many of the targets have disappeared. A Brookings Institute report suggested that the sectarian cleansing was "complete" by October of 2006.

Of course, the Republican neocon architects of the Surge, eager to claim credit for the decline in violence, downplay the role of sectarian cleansing. Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, a prime mover of the Surge told PBS, "there's this magnificent myth out there that there are no mixed areas in Iraq anymore and that the cleaning is complete." CNN's Michael Ware, who has been reporting from Baghdad since before the war began, took Kagan's argument apart. "The sectarian cleansing of Baghdad as been -- albeit tragic -- one of the key elements to the drop in sectarian violence in the capital. It's a very simple concept: Baghdad has been divided; separated into Sunni and Shia enclaves. The days of mixed neighborhoods are gone. If anyone is telling you that the cleansing of Baghdad has not contributed to the fall in violence, they either simply do not understand Baghdad or they are lying to you."

There can be no doubt that the comparative calm that we are seeing now is primarily a result of the murder, dispersal and rearrangement of people that the civil war and sectarian cleansing have wrought. The scary part is that those resentments and hatreds still seethe. Iraq is still a long, long way from peace and prosperity, much less democracy.

More on Iraq's Sectarian Cleansing

The Awakening
The vast majority of Iraqis were not at all happy that foreign "Al Qaeda"-type fighters (whether actually aligned with Osama bin Laden's terrorist network or not) had flowed into their country following the U.S. invasion. These folks rarely dared Saddam Hussein's wrath by venturing into Iraq prior to the American war. Most of these fighters came from Saudi Arabia, perhaps the leading terrorist-exporting nation on earth, but one that the Republicans will never confront, certainly not those as cozy to the oil sheikhs as Bush-Cheney.

However, as dismay and outrage over the American occupation grew among even moderate Iraqis, foreign "terrorists" found easy cover in a land where they spoke the language and shared many cultural and religious traditions, unlike the Americans. Though never nearly as strong in number as the Bush administration would routinely insinuate, their bully tactics, utter violence and fundamentalist exhortations were hard for anyone, including their Sunni brethren, to condone. Finally, in late 2006, the Iraqi Sunnis, themselves had had enough.

When an Iraqi tribe in Anbar Province near the border with Syria got fed up with the Al Qaeda bullying, they went to the U.S. Army and proposed to fight against their fellow Sunnis... in exchange for American arms and dollars, of course. They called themselves the "Anbar Awakening". The Americans were happy to oblige, and thus was begun a movement of "awakenings" all over Sunni-controlled Iraq. Now we, the American taxpayers, are arming and paying thousands of Iraqi Sunni fighters to face off against Saudi and other Sunni "terrorists" operating in Iraq.

This arrangement has a few downsides. First, we are never quite sure who we are paying. In many cases, American military personnel are certain they are arming and paying people who some time earlier were shooting at Americans! And it's highly likely that some foreign terrorist types have funneled some of those arms and cash their way. Moreover, the Iraqi government is not happy, at all, with a "third army", armed to the teeth, in the cities and countryside, unaccountable to anyone. How these various militias will be controlled in the future is anyone's guess. And it's very unsettling to think that once upon a time Republicans thought it was really, truly, a wonderful idea to arm Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden!

Still, these Sunni fighters have taken it to Al Qaeda in ways our American soldiers never could. These guys know the terrain, they know the cities, they know the language, they know who is good and who is evil (at least to their way of thinking). The foreign terrorists can't believe it. How could their religious brethren take up arms against them, and in support of the "filthy crusaders"? As they scramble back to Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan or Pakistan, they can only shake their bearded heads in anger.

Additionally, timely and accurate intelligence provided by the Awakening has allowed covert operations conducted by American and coalition personnel to become more targeted and effective.

As with the sectarian cleansing, supporters of the Surge rarely credit the Awakening for its extremely important role in targeting foreign terrorists, and thereby decreasing their attacks on Iraqis and American forces. Recently, American forces turned Anbar Province over to Iraqi security forces, with little or no mention of the role of the Awakening in making this possible.

In the 2008 presidential campaign, John McCain even went so far as to credit the Surge for sparking the Awakening, which is patently false (though typical Republican gerrymandering of the truth). The Awakening predates the Surge, and there can be zero doubt that the Awakening has done far more damage to Al Qaeda in Iraq than the Surge.

Watch a New York Times video on the Anbar Awakening

The Shia Truce
Meanwhile, how about those crazy Shias? What have they been up to while the Sunnis were going at each other?

Like the Sunnis, the Shias had their own little family squabble going. (Despicable as he was, you have to be amazed at how Saddam managed to keep something of a lid on this cauldron of hatred). It seems two of the leading Shia clerics, the famous Moqtada al-Sadr and the lesser-known but more politically involved Abdul Aziz al-Hakin, had formed their own militias which often feuded and clashed with each other. This conflict was referred to as "a civil war within a civil war".

However, near the end of August, 2007, al-Sadr announced a six month truce, during which he would instruct his militia to not confront other Shia forces or the Americans. Two months later, the two leaders entered into a truce that would stop any further violence, and include more cooperation in trying to get the Iraqi government at long last jump-started.

This Shia truce has held ever since. Much of the relative quiet in Baghdad is a result of the truce, and sure enough the Iraqi government has made some forward progress. U.S. military personnel were only marginally involved in arranging this truce between the Shia clerics, and the Surge had little to do with it.

The Walls of Baghdad
Never mentioned by Bush, Cheney or McCain has been the frantic effort by the American military (and private contractors) to turn Baghdad into neo-Berlin.

Well, one way to keep the Hatfields and McCoys from killing each other, is to build a wall, cold, gray and 20 feet high, between them.

The first walls went up in late 2003 in the so-called "Green Zone", protecting Americans, Iraqi government leaders and other "dignitaries" from the rabble. Now there are walls, or something similar (barbed wire, piles of rocks) all over town. Some of the walls soar 20 feet high. One wall, begun in April 2007, is over three miles long, and surrounds the Sunni district of Adharniya. Over 7000 Iraqis marched in protest of this wall going up. The Iraqi government requested that the Americans cease building the wall, but military commanders (and presumably the Pentagon and Cheney-Bush) refused. The wall went up.

These walls cut off all contact between blocks that before the American invasion were friendly (more or less) neighbors. The walls disrupt everything: communication, commerce, transportation, and, of course, violence.

Many Baghdad residents are outraged at the construction of the walls, regarding it as re-engineering of their capital city by a foreign force. Others are ambivalent. Anything to quell the violence.

"It's both annoying and useful," a Baghdad resident told USA Today. "It makes us feel like prisoners, but things have calmed down since they built it."

Time will tell whether these walls become part and parcel of Baghdad's long term security, or whether they become a potent symbol of the shameful hostile invasion and occupation of the nation of Iraq by the United States of America.

Even today the constuction continues. For now, they are quelling violence, but it didn't take a Surge to build these walls.

More on the Walls of Baghdad

The Surge
Notice the timeline of the circumstances and efforts detailed above. All of these were well under way either before the Surge fully engaged in the summer of 2007, or shortly thereafter, with little or no influence by the Surge itself.

Meanwhile, the Surge was largely politically motivated, and, even if you are one of the very few who still believe the War in Iraq was a good idea, the Surge should never have been necessary in the first place.

Following the Republican losses in the November 2006 mid-term elections, George W. Bush fired Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the real architect of the Iraq military plan based upon a minimal force being needed to invade and hold the country. Almost every general had expressed their opposition (quite accurate in retrospect) to such a plan, advising the president that up 300,000 troops would be needed for the mission. Rumsfeld wanted to go in with less than half that number. Bush and Cheney pushed aside any general who voiced lack of confidence in Rumsfeld's plan, and the others got the message: get on-board with our plan to invade Iraq, or prepare for retirement. From the start, Bush claimed to be listening intently to his generals; from the start it was a bald-faced lie.

Prior to the invasion, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, John McCain and a cacophony of other conservative cheerleaders promised it would be a quick and snappy war, with Americans being greeted as liberators, and American "Shock and Awe" ruling day! Rumsfeld doubted that it would even take six months to complete the job. McCain said, "I think things will be fairly easy. We're not going to get into house-to-house fighting," and regarding the ominous prospect of Sunni-Shia conflict claimed, "there's not a history of clashes that are violent between Sunnis and Shias. So I think they can probably get along." McCain couldn't have been more wrong. Actually, there's over one thousand years of history of clashes between the Sunnis and Shias! Things would be anything but "easy", and house-to-house fighting in Iraq was just about to commence.

Very predictably, things went downhill from the get-go, as the "Coalition of the Willing" didn't have enough troops to secure Baghdad, much less the rest of the country. For Iraqis, the euphoria of being rid of Saddam Hussein quickly disintegrated into utter chaos. The National Museum was looted, ammunition and weapons dumps were looted, the country burst into flames. The only building secured was the Oil Ministry (imagine that). General Tommy Franks (who was also against the plan, but agreed to lead it anyway since he was a personal friend of Bush's), clearly understanding that all Hell was about to break loose, quickly scampered out of Dodge after hanging out in Baghdad for just a few days.

Subsequently virtually nothing went right, as the utterly incompetent Bush administration sent waves of political cronies, hacks, private contractors, not to mention cash (at least $10 billion flat lost) to achieve a mission that truly had no objective... except to steal the oilfields of Iraq! But they couldn't even accomplish that, and soon the tiny window of opportunity to depose the dictator, declare victory, and give the country over to the Iraqis slammed shut. Our brave soldiers were trapped.

Then there ensued three years of "staying the course", even as violence escalated. Ancient animosities between the three religious and cultural sects of Iraq boiled over; terrorists from other nations were atracted like moths to a flame at the prospect of picking off American soldiers one-by-one or two-by-two. The death toll of American soldiers flew past one thousand, then two thousand, then three thousand. The number of Iraqis killed, by American fire or by the sectarian violence, has never been clearly established. It could well be in the hundreds of thousands.

Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward writes in his book The War Within, "After ordering the invasion, the president spent three years in denial. Bush was intolerant of confrontations and in-depth debate. There was no deadline, no hurry. The president was engaged in the war rhetorically but maintained an odd detachment from its management. He never got a full handle on it, and over these years of war, too often he failed to lead."

By November of 2006, stinging from the mid-terms, Bush, Dick Cheney, House minority whip Roy Blunt and other conservative leaders at long last admitted (in a Republican think tank meeting) that their war strategy (or lack thereof) had been a disaster. They blamed it on the departed Rumsfeld, though each of them had been fully engaged in the planning and pathetic implementation. From this meeting came the impluse to shake things up on the ground in Iraq. However, it wouldn't take the form that the mid-term elections, and most Democrats, would have suggested. The Democrats had welcomed the election results as a mandate for getting out of Iraq, or at least significantly reducing troop force. This was the strategy that the "general on the ground", George Casey, favored. He told the joint chiefs, who were inclined to agree, that "we have to draw down for the Iraqis to take over." Of course, this was not what the oilmen in the White House wanted to hear. They weren't leaving behind the Iraqi oilfields.

A month later, yet another conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, recommended that the U.S. increase the number of troops in Iraq. It was the usual cast of suspects, the neocons chickenhawks: Richard Perle, Fred Kagan, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, et al. Did this gaggle consider that the effects we have discussed here: 1) the Sectarian Cleansing that was "almost complete", 2) the Awakening movements that were already turning the tables on foreign terrorists in Iraq, 3) the Shia Truce, and 4) the walls of Baghdad (much less all four combined) would very likely lead to reduced violence, and American casualties, in the near-term... with or without a "surge"? Of course they did! They were already playing a losing hand, had just lost the mid-terms, so why not stake their minimal remaining credibility on an escalation of forces in Iraq, counting on reduced violence no matter what happened? Except it couldn't be called an "escalation"... too Vietnam sounding. The Republican master wordsmiths went to work. "Surge" had just the right tone. And the overall strategy: the "New Way Forward". Now they just needed to implement their plan.

This "New Way Forward", recommending an increase of troop strength in Iraq by some 25,000-30,000, was in effect agreed upon by Bush when he met with the State Department on December 11, 2006. At this point, he had yet to run the idea by any general. The "Surge" was entirely a Republican think tank strategy. John McCain, lately yet another critic of Rumsfeld, quickly signed on as a prime booster.

Two days after his meeting with the State Department, Bush finally took his plan for an increase in troop level to the joint chiefs. Almost to a man, they were opposed. The generals seriously doubted whether an additional 25,000-30,000 troops could make much of a difference across Iraq, or even in Baghdad, and all were very concerned about the strain the military was already under and how such an increase could further adversely affect readiness for any other military emergency. Some believed that such a move would actually represent a dangerous and reckless risk to American security. The joint chiefs expressed concern about "the erosion of the U.S. military's ability to deal with other crises around the world because of the heavy commitment in Iraq and the stress on troops and equipment, as well as the significantly increased risk to readiness in the event of a new emergency".

The generals pointed out to Bush that five brigades was essentially the country's strategic reserve, that longer deployments would be required for all soldiers, and that attrition of officers and soldiers would rise due to reluctance to re-enlist and early retirements. "You're stressing the force, Mr. President," General Peter Schoomaker told Bush. Moreover, when the generals pressed the White House on what their "fall-back" plan was, it turned out there wasn't any.

Bush's commander in the field, General George Casey, was adamantly opposed to the idea, and furious that he had been left out of the loop as such strategy was being discussed by the White House and State Department. General Schoomaker was apalled that the idea had come from the American Enterprise Institute, asking, "Since when does the AEI trump the joint chiefs?"

In the end, Bush ignored them all, reassigned General Peter Pace, General Schoomaker, General John Abizaid and General Casey, installing General David Petraeus as commander in Iraq. Petraeus had not been involved in the strategy sessions, but was willing to accept the promotion to lead Bush's "New Way Forward". Even including Petreaus, about the only general who was gung-ho for the surge was retired former vice chief of staff Jack Keane, who lectured the current joint chiefs that Iraq is not the kind of war that you win and go home. "We're going to be here for 50 years minimum," he said. Music to the ears of the neocons... and John McCain (now you know where he got his "maybe 100 years" quip during the 2008 Republican Primary).

The Surge was announced by George W. Bush on January 10, 2007. In a speech to military personnel and their families at Ft. Benning, Georgia, the president said, "The commanders on the ground in Iraq, people who I listen to --- by the way that's what you want your commander-in-chief to do. You don't want your military decisions being made based upon politics or focus groups or political polls. You want your military decisions made by military experts. They analyzed the plan, and they said to me and to the Iraqi government: This won't work unless we help them. There needs to be a bigger presence."

It was a stunningly devious speech, one colossal lie! The Surge was concocted by a focus group, not by military experts. Indeed, it was opposed by almost everyone in the military command!

The Surge was launched in February 2007, but only brought the full compliment of some 28,000 soldiers to Iraq in late June 2007. Only then did major "counter-insurgency" efforts get underway. The first operations were launched in Anbar Province, where the Awakening had been routing foreign terrorists for half a year.

Now, over a year since the full contingent of American soldiers arrived in Iraq, we are told by Bush, Cheney and McCain that it has been an astounding success, and rarely, if ever, do they mention any other possible cause for the reduction in violence. They want ALL the credit! But stop, let's consider. Seriously. 28,000 soldiers is a force approximately equivalent in size to a stadium crowd at a Texas high school football game! Iraq is the size of California! Baghdad, itself, has a population over seven million! Yeah, right... after five years of chaos, all it took was throwing a high school football stadium full of soldiers into the mix. Duh, why didn't we think of that in the first place? Actually, the generals did. From the very start, they realized that this mission was a whole lot bigger than the Republican politicians were imagining. Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and McCain didn't listen... even though they told the American people, and the American military, over and over, that the generals were the only ones they were listening to... certainly not any focus groups or ideologues. They lied. And that, ladies and gentlemen, represents one of the Biggest Lies in American history!

None of this is to denigrate in any way the courage, valor and effectiveness of the U.S. (or other coalition) troops in Iraq. The presence of additional U.S. soldiers on the ground in Iraq has probably helped the situation (though there are many in Iraq and elsewhere who continue to strongly assert that the American military presence in Iraq is causing more conflict than it is preventing). But the recent decline in violence, and the sliver of light at the end of the tunnel in Iraq, is not the result of the Surge alone. Far from it. The situation in Iraq has improved, but was, and still is, far worse than the Bush administration, or the McCain campaign, dare to admit.

Bush and McCain are both still telling lies to the American people. And even to the American military, which should absolutely infuriate anyone who is in the service today, anyone who is a veteran, or anyone who deeply cares about the United States of America. That our brave service men and women have been so used and abused by this lying commander-in-chief, egged on by chickenhawk-haunted conservative think tanks, and sent into undermanned, under-equipped, ill-defined and no-way-out missions is absolutely reprehensible, despicable, and, actually, traitorous.

-- Rusticus