Surge in Iraq Accomplished both Goals the Defeat of the Insurgency and the Reconciliation of Iraqis

The following was written on March 2008.  It’s republished here for the readers of this new blog.

 By Con George-Kotzabasis

The critic of President Bush turns the tail of  his “priority” into the head priority as only by doing this he can make his argument that the “surge failed in its primary task”( By early 2008), i.e., to achieve political reconciliation.  But the primary task of the Surge was not political reconciliation but the reduction of violence and the cooperation of Iraqis to fight and protect themselves from the suicidal jihadists of al-Qaeda. It’s on the pivot of the reduction and relative elimination of violence that political reconciliation will eventually rest.

The first paragraph of Bush’s announcement, which the critic quotes, ironically demolishes his own argument, as the promise of the Surge, in the words of the President himself, was that by “reducing the violence inBaghdadwill make reconciliation possible”.

And as I predicted in a paper of mine published on my blog Nemesis, on March 2007, under the title “Blueprint for Victory inIraq”, the Surge would succeed in defeating the insurgency and would open the door to reconciliation between Iraqis and to democracy.