Ryan Crocker made a difference in Iraq

David Ignatius:

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Crocker's innate skepticism made him wary of Bush's decision to invade Iraq. He won't talk about his policy views, even now, except to say: "It was all opaque to me. I couldn't see what would happen." But he argues: "It doesn't matter what I or anyone else thinks about the wisdom of going in 2003. It's a distraction. We're in. We've been in for six years. . . . The focus has to be on where we go now."

Crocker arrived as ambassador in Baghdad in March 2007. Bush had already decided on a surge of additional U.S. troops there, but Crocker remembers wondering in the early days, "How on earth are we going to make this a better place?" A virtuous cycle slowly took hold: Newly confident Sunni Muslims began fighting al-Qaeda; Shiites decided they didn't need protection from the death squads of the Mahdi Army; and finally all the major Iraqi parties came together to endorse Crocker's appeal for a status-of-forces agreement and the gradual withdrawal of U.S. troops.

The key to success in Iraq, insists Crocker, was the psychological impact of Bush's decision to add troops. "In the teeth of ferociously negative popular opinion, in the face of a lot of well-reasoned advice to the contrary, he said he was going forward, not backward."

Bush's decision rocked America's adversaries, says Crocker: "The lesson they had learned from Lebanon was, 'Stick it to the Americans, make them feel the pain, and they won't have the stomach to stick it out.' That assumption was challenged by the surge."

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Crocker gets it the way the Democrats never did. Democrats were hell bent on replaying Lebanon, thinking it would be a disaster they could lay on Bush and the Republicans and ignoring how disastrous it would be for the country. By bucking that tide, Bush handed the enemy a major strategic defeat that the Democrats are still reluctant to acknowledge because in doing so they would have to admit how wrong they were.