There was more to surge than number of troops

Randall Hovan:

The "surge" in Iraq sure appears to have worked. There are some who say President Bush should have listened to voices such as Senator John McCain and then Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki in the first place, rather than taking the foolish advice of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other "neo-con" hardliners.

But before we give all the credit to the "more boots on the ground" stompers and all the blame to Rumsfeld and the neo-cons, let's take a second look at the surge.

To set the stage, let's look at the results to date. (In the following, my reference is the Brookings Institute's "Iraq Index" dated July 17, 2008. )

• US troop and Iraqi civilian fatality rates are at their lowest points since the war began in 2003.
• Today Iraq has legitimate elections, a constitution and a functioning parliament. It is considered more politically free than virtually any country in the Middle East, including Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Kuwait.
• Gross Domestic Product has almost tripled, from $20.5B (US dollars) in 2002 to $60.9B in 2008.
• Oil production in each of the last three months (May-July 2008) has exceeded the peak pre-war estimated rate of 2.5 million barrels per day. Oil exports now bring in about $7 billion per month, and rising.
• Pre-war, only 4 to 8 hours of electricity were available per day nationwide, on average. In July 2008, electricity was available an average of almost 12 hours per day, an improvement of 50% to 200%.
• There are more than twice as many registered cars, more than 10 times as many telephone subscribers and more than 50 times as many internet subscribers.
• Under Saddam, Iraq had no commercial TV or radio stations and no independent newspapers or magazines. Zero. Today it has dozens of TV stations and hundreds of radio stations, newspapers and magazines.
• More children are in school, and more doctors, judges and security personnel have been trained and are being trained.

In addition to the above, the White House has reported that the Iraqi government achieved "satisfactory" progress on 15 of 18 political benchmarks as set by Congress and the President.

With results like these, who can deny the "surge" is working? I will, to a certain extent.

It's not that the surge isn't working -- something sure is working. It's that giving all the credit to the "surge" is a vast oversimplification. It gives too much credit to the "more boots on the ground" advocates and too much blame to Rumsfeld and his "neo-con" cohorts. The surge probably needed certain conditions in place beforehand; it almost surely would not have worked at just any time since March 2003.

How big was the surge? The surge was announced in January 2007. In 2006 the number of US troops in Iraq peaked at 144,000 in September and October. The US troop level peaked about one year later, at 171,000 in October 2007. That is a 19% increase.

However, some of those US troops were making up for a loss of non-US troops. Total coalition troops went from 162,000 in September 2006 to 182,668 in October 2007. An increase of less than 13%. That was the "surge" in terms of coalition troop levels - 13 %.

To put these numbers in perspective, General Shinseki estimated that 400,000 or even 500,000 troops would be needed. At the very peak of the surge, the actual number of US troops was barely over a third of that.

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There is much more.

What many do not take into account was the surge in Iraqi Army forces which doubled during the course of the surge. Add to that the "Sons of ..." forces and you are looking at well over 400,000 including the US forces. But it was more than just sheer numbers. By getting out of the FOBs and protecting the people the intelligence on enemy activities took a quantum leap. The Sons of forces also provided intelligence on al Qaeda and others when they rallied to our side.

I tend to agree that the stage had been set by much of the earlier activities of cleaning out the al Qaeda rat lines and knocking off Zarqawi. These things had a cumulative effect that made the surge more effective. There was also the intelligence we found in one of our raids on al Qaeda which explained their "belts" strategy around Baghdad which helped us locate and destroy their sanctuaries.

The two keys to success were getting an adequate force to space ratio and protecting the people. You know the force to space ratio is inadequate when you are having to buy the same real estate more than once. We are still in that posture in parts of Afghanistan.