Even if one doesn't believe Muntadher when he said that we gave the police commandos lists of people, all of the other evidence suggests that a secret killing program targeting Al Qaeda in Iraq (a claim made by National Security Adviser Hadley according to Bob Woodward) was not responsible for the success of the surge. After all, we were always arresting people with little evidence - sometimes they were just the military-aged men in the vicinity of an attack (see Jerry Burke's comments on the 4th Infantry Division). Once they were arrested, they could be held indefinitely, so there was no need to kill anyone who didn't fight back. If we knew the whereabouts of substantially more AQI insurgents around the time of the surge, it would have to have been because they were working with Sunnis, putting more troops on the streets or otherwise investigating things in a way that was previously discouraged.
If this isn't why he was fired, then why are articles on the "generals' revolt" so vague? What decisions years after debaathification caused them to deem him incompetent in 2006?
This more-complete story shows that it is a myth that well-intentioned people cannot make a situation better by toppling a dictator, but it is also a myth that well-intentioned people, if they exist in the world, can ever come to power in the US, and stay well-intentioned at that.
Conservatives in the know are surely aware that this talk of Iraq being gradually given up to Iran over a longer period of time is false. Just knowing what SCIRI, and to a lesser extent Dawa, were would mean knowing that Iran won Iraq's first elections.
Why should we even consider the possibility that our troops were lied into a dangerous situation against our (and Iraqis') interests? Many Americans have already accepted this reality. Donald Trump said during the campaign that we were lied into Iraq. If I am guilty of apostasy, then he is too.
Trump happens to be right. Bush outright interrupted the inspections with the invasion, Clinton sabotaged his inspections, and H.W. Bush said that we wanted sanctions until Saddam was out whether he eliminated his WMDs or not. And from this page from the Institute for Public Accuracy we have this:
November 7, 1997: Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz: "The American government says openly, clearly, that it's not going to endorse lifting the sanctions on Iraq unless the leadership of Iraq is changed."
The CIA's experts largely disputed the case for war on every point, but Tenet was for it, so nothing else mattered (if he wasn't, Bush could have chosen a new CIA head). The neocons even made up evidence.
Some people on both the right and the left might be inclined to believe that if we set our enemies against each other, it was to save us from having to fight as many of them. This would make sense in a different scenario. In this scenario, however, you can see that firing the army and having returned exiles kill the Sunni leaders created enemies where there were none. It wouldn't make sense to believe that insurgents would kill only Shia given that we were clearly allied with Badr, as the Zarqawi letter noted. Moreover, because the regular army was 80% Shia, it is probable that even the nationalist Shia Mahdi Army, who were not particularly involved in this campaign of revenge early on, were well armed because they had taken their weapons from their bases home. Thus, Rumsfeld would clearly have known that what he was doing would only get more Americans killed at each step of the way.
Iranian activity in IraqThe administration claimed that Iranian proxies were killing our troops as early as 2004, and Rumsfeld even suggested that this might be happening as early as June 30, 2003, just three months in. Yet inexplicably the administration showed no concern that the Badr Brigade, obviously Iran's proxy if there ever was one, might use their free reign to give insurgents weapons, money, intel on VIP or troop movements (to attack them and/or notify insurgents that it wasn't safe to transport weapons), or uniforms to access secure areas and kill VIPs. This means that either the administration didn't believe that Iranians wanted to kill Americans, or they just didn't care about any deaths Iran could cause. Considering the vulnerability of VIPs, I conclude that the former is the case.
We now know why some standard Iranian military weapons were found in Iraq, supposing that those claims are correct: we implicitly gave them permission to arm their side by allowing their proxy to operate, and the Shia needed the weapons once the civil war grew in 2006. They ended up needing help against much the same foes in 2014. The fact that some were diverted towards other groups and used against Americans does not implicate Iran in intentionally trying to kill Americans.
As for the claim that they sent explosively formed penetrators (EFPs), in the Columbia Journalism Review Paul McLeary noted three separate instances of EFP factories being found in Iraq. For example, Andrew Cockburn reported in the LA times that an EFP copper-disc factory was found in Iraq (and that historically, EFPs were even produced by the French Resistance), while the administration was claiming that EFPs were so sophisticated that they could only come from Iran.
It is perhaps possible that Iran sent EFP materials throughout the entire war even though they were constantly being threatened by the US for sending them since 2004 (the first suspected use was in late 2003), even though the US claimed that Iran helpfully left traceable serial numbers on bags of explosives, even though they would be endangering their proxy's seat of power before the surge, and even though we said after the surge (credibly) that we were only leaving once violence dropped.
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