--Awesome U.S. firepower, concentrated on Iraqi insurgents and civilian bystanders for more than five years, had slaughtered countless thousands of Iraqis and had intimidated many others to look simply to their own survival.
We also noted that many military analysts shared our doubts about the positive significance of Bush's "surge." For his book, The War Within, the Washington Post's Bob Woodward interviewed a number of military officials and concluded:
"In Washington, conventional wisdom translated these events into a simple view: The surge had worked. But the full story was more complicated. At least three other factors were as important as, or even more important than, the surge."
Woodward reported that the Sunni rejection of al-Qaeda extremists in Anbar province (which preceded the surge) and the surprise decision of radical Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr to order a unilateral cease-fire by his militia were two important factors.
A third factor, which Woodward argued may have been the most significant, was the use of new highly classified U.S. intelligence tactics that allowed for rapid targeting and killing of insurgent leaders. Woodward agreed to withhold details of these secret techniques from his book so as not to undercut their continued success.
As the extra U.S. troops arrived in 2007, the "surge" actually contributed to a spike in violence as both U.S. and Iraqi casualties reached some of the worst levels of the war. About 1,000 U.S. soldiers died during the Bush/Petraeus "surge."
Petraeus also tolerated loose "rules of engagement" for killings Iraqi "military-aged males" For instance, a video, released by WikiLeaks earlier this year and entitled "Collateral Murder," showed an American helicopter crew cavalierly gunning down a group of Iraqi men, including two Reuters journalists, on July 12, 2007.
Taking Credit
However, as the levels of violence gradually declined in 2008, the influential neocons of Washington were quick to claim credit for the "successful surge." The Washington press corps fell into line, with prominent anchors like CNN's Wolf Blitzer parroting the talking point.
During Campaign 2008, the news media then put Obama on the defensive for having opposed the "surge" while in the U.S. Senate.
When Obama tried to argue that the reasons for the decline in violence were more complicated than simply "the surge worked," he was hectored by media questioners, including CBS anchor Katie Couric and ABC's George Stephanopoulos, demanding to know why he wouldn't just admit that Sen. John McCain had been "right" about the surge.
Finally, Obama chose to retreat, admitting to Fox News' Bill O'Reilly that the surge "succeeded beyond our wildest dreams." That assessment has continued to dominate in Washington two years later.
However, the latest trove of WikiLeaks documents is further proof that the reality in Iraq was much more complicated than Washington's neocons and the U.S. news media have been willing to admit. The records show that the "surge" was not the panacea that the American people were led to believe.
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