News coverage of Iraq has been unremittingly negative from 2003 to the present. This has tended to obscure the real pattern of what has happened there: steady improvement for more than two years following the war, followed by steeply worsening conditions starting in 2006, succeeded by the significant improvement that has attended the surge.
These days, it is fashionable to bash the "Rumsfeld strategy" for Iraq. Characteristically, the Bush administration makes no serious effort to defend what it did in Iraq between 2003 and 2006. In reality, the facts on the ground suggest that the "Rumsfeld strategy," which emphasized minimizing American casualties while training Iraqi forces to effect a handover of control, was working until it was sabotaged by the sectarian violence that was triggered by al Qaeda and accelerated rapidly in 2006.
One can argue that we were too slow to respond to those worsening conditions, and that's probably true. On the whole, though, it is fair to characterize the surge as having put Iraq back on the successful trajectory that prevailed from 2003 through 2005. That, at least, is what the Iraqis' survey responses tell us.
Precisely. It is necessary to look at the broad sweep of the war and not remember summer 2006 throught summer 2007 as the entire war up until then. We did attempt to secure Baghdad at least twice in the summer of 2006 but both efforts failed under the old rules.
But we finally recognized that we were in a new phase of the war by fall 2006 and the surge was our response to the new situation.
And that surge has succeeded. Now we have to see if this was the last major phase of the war or whether our enemies will adapt and compel our side to again cope with and defeat yet another phase of the war.
But even if our enemies do that, we are clearly on a path to victory. Our enemies get pounded and adapt while Iraqi forces gain strength every month. And the enemy may have run out of adaptations.
An interesting aside is that while we've reduced violence to 2005 levels, our press coverage of the war in 2008 is far more favorable (or non-existent coverage in a variation of "favorable" that recognizes a shortage of juicy bad news) now than in 2005 when our press still was negative. Clearly our situation is far better now with superior Iraqi forces than a simple count of combat encounters would indicate.
