When President Bush announced the surge strategy in January 2007, he argued that his plan would reduce violence and give the Iraqi government “the breathing space it needs to make progress in other critical areas.” As former Press Secretary Tony Snow later explained

But the point is you’re trying to add strength to the forces in Iraq so that they’re going to be successful in taking out sectarian violence and also al Qaeda violence, so that you have the conditions under which people can pursue the important business of political reconciliation and economic development.

But the surge has failed to meet these objectives. According to a new report from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, U.S. attempts at political reconciliation, economic growth, and building an effective police force in Iraq “have failed to show significant progress in nearly every one of the nation’s provincial regions and the capital.”

In fact, the New York Times notes that “the picture that emerges is far from confidence-inspiring, and raises the question of whether any Western program, no matter how well founded, can overcome the challenges of putting Iraq back together again.”

The answer seems to be that it can’t. As Gen. David Petraeus noted in March of 2007, without political reconciliation, there is no military solution to Iraq. Thus, by Bush’s own standard, the surge has failed. The troops must come home.

UPDATE: A few weeks ago, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih told the Washington Post, “I don’t think there is something called reconciliation, and there will be no reconciliation as such.”

This entry was is filed under Incompetence, Body Shots. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.