Even though I think that President Bush needs to consider how to buy more time in Iraq in case the next president wishes to lose in Iraq, we shouldn't forget that the surge already bought us a lot of time.
I was much more pessimistic a year ago about the ability of the surge to buy time for victory. Indeed, I feared that the surge could work on the ground militarily while exhausting our home morale faster, making it a net loss. My main worry was sustaining home front morale long enough to provide enough support for Iraqi forces to win with declining American help.
While in general I think I'm right that our goal after this spring is to pull to the background as much as possible to let Iraqis take the lead in direct combat (watch the Mosul effort developing), I was wrong about our home morale. The surge has revitalized home morale. And that, as I wrote over a year ago, was the main factor for my pessimism about our role:
Our loyal opposition won't let us analyze this war objectively. They want to lose this war and are limited only by the state of public opinion. We have been in a race between defeating our enemies and defeating ourselves since fall 2003. We have to look ahead to the entire race and not just our portion. In Vietnam, we won our part of the race. But we stayed long enough to give a defeatist Congress the strength to forbid the South Vietnamese from finishing that race. I don't have the answer to this question. We have to draw down soon enough to preserve residual support for finishing the war but not so fast that we hinder the ability of the Iraqis to take the lead. And whenever we pull back (not out completely), we must not look like we are retreating or sound like it back home.
To my surprise, public views of the war have improved more rapidly and during the war itself. And this public opinion has clearly limited what the pro-retreat side can do while President Bush remains in office waging the war.
And just as important, thrashing al Qaeda in Iraq and nullifying the Sadrists erases the chance our drawdown will look like retreat.
So our Phase VII won't need to be as minimal as I feared it would have to be in order to sustain American support a little longer, balancing how much direct aid to provide the Iraqis in order to win with the decline in our home morale that providing that aid would cause.
I do believe the surge has bought the time we need both in Baghdad and in Washington to win this war.
I think we have enough time.
