Why The Surge Was Really A Debacle

The famous ‘surge’ has proved a complete failure, says John C. Hulsman. Whatever Obama may say, nation-building is a luxury America can no longer afford

With Britain now withdrawn from Basra and American troops gone from the streets of Baghdad, Iraq is no longer front-page news. While there are still intermittent reports of carnage, and obscure stories written about political rumblings there, the problem seems manageable, far away, forgotten. Americans worry about the great recession, healthcare reform, and a little bit about Afghanistan. But Iraq has been conveniently forgotten.

This case of collective amnesia has been aided and abetted by a narrative that allows us to forget both Iraq’s frustrating intricacies and its horrors. The convenient narrative is this: that at the last possible moment the surge — the desperate build-up of American troops led by a dynamic American general, David Petraeus — snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, turning around the Bush administration’s grand exercise in nation-building. Sadly, and not for the first time, wishful thinking, rather than concrete reality, underlies this much-touted success.

For the simple truth remains that the surge, by its own professed political yardstick, has clearly failed. Iraq is, remains and will be a basket case; it certainly will not be sorted out a year from now, as President Obama has implied in announcing that the American combat mission will end on 31 August 2010. Perhaps the only bit of bleak good news is that any further significant American adventures in nation-building, following the doleful experiences in Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, will prove difficult to justify politically at home.

In a sense, that is why the surge narrative is so important for the Washington elite, which continues to live in the never-never-land of American unipolar dominance that flowered so briefly with the end of the Cold War. For if Iraq is generally seen to be a failure, how can the favoured policy of nation- building/humanitarian intervention supported by a majority of foreign policy thinkers in both parties (be they Wilsonians in the Democratic party or neoconservatives in the Republican party) remain credible in a country increasingly aware that it urgently needs to set its own house in order? Success in Iraq is becoming a place-marker for a wider fight about the efficacy, morality and desirability of nation-building as a strategy writ large.

A long article by Prof. Hulsman but worth reading.