As McCormack notes below, American Prospect wunderkind Ezra Klein made an astonishing assertion regarding the surge yesterday:
The argument over the surge was never an argument positing that more troops couldn't lead to less violence. Folks forget this, but the surge was actually part of Howard Dean's 2004 candidacy, when he was running as an anti-war candidate. In June 2003, on Meet the Press, he said, "I can tell you one thing, though. We need more troops in Afghanistan. We need more troops in Iraq now." I disagreed with him, but that was the plan: More troops, leading to less violence, leading to withdrawal. It was a plan that Democrats, even liberal Democrats, supported. Would Brooks like to credit Dean as a military visionary?
Before charging forward, I should mention that a while ago I swore to ignore Klein's commentary, regardless of how counterfactual or juvenile it was. I made this commitment at roughly the same time I vowed to stop knocking the walkers out from under enfeebled old ladies as they crossed the street in front of my house. I had come to the realization that picking on the lame and defenseless was wrong.
But Klein's commentary here requires a response. The Democrats, all of them except Joe Lieberman, spent the months leading up to the surge and initial months of the surge pronouncing it a hopeless failure. On April 18, 2007, months before the surge had even been fully implemented, no less a military authority than Harry Reid declared, "This war is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything."
When Klein is saying the Democrats supported the introduction of more troops to Iraq, he is grossly distorting what actually happened. When Democrats and war opponents referred to more troops, they did so in only one context - they insisted that it would take roughly a half million more troops to make a dent in Iraq. If you don't believe me, scroll through the archives of Andrew Sullivan, who was a reliable warehouse of anti-surge talking points back in the day.
Because adding half a million troops to the theatre was undoable, the next logical step for Democrats was to insist on retreat and surrender. It's particularly ironic (and likely disingenuous) that Klein cites Howard Dean as a far-seeing lefty hawk. The whole thrust of Dean's insurgent 2004 campaign was that he alone among the Democratic candidates wanted to withdraw from Iraq immediately.
Have American Prospect staffers really forgotten all that "I'm from the Democratic wing of the Democratic party" stuff? Have they forgotten the halcyon days when lefties, in an unfortunate act of Lakoffian framing, tirelessly endeavored to rebrand the surge as "the escalation?" Contra Klein, It was never Howard Dean's "plan" to put more troops in Iraq. Rather, it was his intellectual construct that we needed a lot more troops and since we didn't have them available, the war had been lost.
Of course, Klein probably hasn't entered this thicket to rehabilitate Howard Dean's reputation as a military strategist. After all, there's another Democrat whose military strategist bona fides are far more in need of buffing.
Barack Obama, again as McCormack points out below, went on record saying the surge wouldn't work. His rationale? The number of new troops was barely significant. Since Obama has based so much of his campaign on his purportedly magnificent judgment, blowing this major call stabs at the heart of his candidacy. After all, if Obama wins, he will be a wartime president whether he likes it or not. In the event of an Obama victory, we can only hope his future judgment on military issues proves better informed than his past judgment.
Of course, while belittling the surge's prospects, Obama did what he nearly always does - he repeated trite liberal talking points as if they were hard and solid facts. Whether he actually paused to understand the nuances of the surge before dismissing it is doubtful. In his defense, what would have been the sense of mastering the details himself since renowned military experts like Harry Reid and the New York Times editorial board had already rendered their judgment?
During the early months of 2006, I spent a great deal of time blogging about a book called "Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife" by Lt. Col. John Nagl. It was a how-to guide to counterinsurgency. When Lt. Pete Hegseth, who now heads the outstanding organization Vets for Freedom, went to fight in Iraq in early 2006, he brought a copy of "Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife" (which he had discovered on his own) with him. My point isn't that I was super-bright or that Pete was super-bright, although Pete is, having overcome his Princeton education rather nicely. My point is that the way forward in Iraq was out there long before the surge began. And the heart of the surge wasn't the additional troops but a change in tactics to focus on counterinsurgency and away from force protection. Intellectually curious Democrats could have found this doctrine just as the Bush administration eventually (and belatedly) did.
And yet the Democrats whined, "We need more troops" in mantra like fashion, meaning not that the surge would be a success but that the additional "surge" troops in Iraq would be insignificant. Barack Obama's comment at the time captured the prevailing lefty sentiment rather well: "I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse."
Wow! What judgment!
ADDENDUM: It wasn't so long ago when Democrats referred to the surge as "the McCain Surge." This was not done out of bipartisanship, and neither was it a show of respect for the single membr of congress who did the most to make the surge a reality. It was yet another way the Democrats expressed their supreme confidence that the surge would fail.
Nevertheless, I guess we're all surge proponents now.
