Yesterday, standing in front of a cheese display in a supermarket in Bethlehem, Pa., John McCain had a lot to say about the surge. As the Wall Street Journal reports it:
McCain began his answer with his definition of "surge" and then shared his own experience while visiting Iraq. "A surge is really a counter-insurgency strategy. And it’s made up of a number of components," McCain said. He continued by explaining that Colonel Sean McFarland, who McCain visited in 2006 and was in charge of operations at Anbar province, had begun a counter-insurgency on his own.
A lot of people have gove into the timeline, and shown McCain to be... well, not consistent with the history as it's recorded. But everyone seems to have given him, and the Conservative Media, a free pass on something more insidious. Trying to actually define what "the surge" means. As a term in the English language. For as George Orwell suggested in Nineteen-Eighty-Four; if something can't be said, then it can't be thought.
Who invented the term, what it meant, and how (and why) the Conservatives are trying to change the meaning of the phrase, below the fold...
Part one: The origin of the term.
Going back through the archives at Google News, the first thing that I noticed was the absense of the words "the surge" from the one source you would think it came from. George Bush's televised address to the nation on January 10, 2007. Here is that speech from the White House website. Check it through yourself (search using Control and F on a PC keyboard, Apple and F on a Mac). He doesn't use the word "surge" at all.
The phrase wasn't used by this Administration at initial press briefings either. The phrases "New Way Forward", "The New Way Forward" and "A new way forward in Iraq" were widely used by White House Press Secretary Tony Snow and the news media prior to the President's speech announcing the policy change.
So where did it come from? Lucky for us Kossacks, someone recorded an early instance of its happening in late 2006. BarbinMD, on Sunday December 17, 2006. Not only does it mention "new way forward", it mentions the term "the surge"...
Earlier this week, the New York Times reported that the American Enterprise Institute had issued a study that called for increasing troops levels in Iraq. And appearing on Journal Editorial Report this morning was noted neo-con, signatory of the Project for the New American Century and AEI member, Fred Kagan, to explain what was needed to achieve victory in Iraq.
And bear in mind, these are the voices George Bush is listening to as he decides on what the "new way forward" will be in Iraq.
Kagan began by saying that securing Baghdad was an "absolute prerequisite," and that it could only be achieved with more troops.
...and it shows where the term came from. Fred Kagan released a PDF document dated December 13, 2006. It's 52 pages long, and it can be downloaded from / seen here. At no point does it contain the word "counterinsurgency", "counter-insurgency", or even "counterin" or "counter-" (with the apostrophe).
Here is every incident of the word "surge" in that document (with my comments in italics):
Page 28: Rapid, thorough clearing operations and strong leave-behind presence in each cleared district combats enemy surge attacks. (Word "surge" means the enemy coming forward like a wave)
Page 32: Short Term Most Dangerous COA [Center Of Attention]: – Surge in for a final, maximum fight against the "last effort" of the Coalition (again, "surge" means the method of progression)
Page 33: Surge IED/VBIED attacks on Coalition (in describing possible retaliations. using John McCain's assertion that "surge" is short for "counterinSURGEncy", this means the insurgents would be having a counterinsurgency against the counterinsurgents. So in this case, in McCain Bizarro World, "surge" is short for "countercounterinSURGEncy")
Page 43: Will this surge deprive the United States of the ability to counter potential threats outside Iraq? The surge of forces into Iraq strengthens our position in the Middle East, where the greatest threats to US national security lie. (THIS IS THE DEFINITIVE PROOF. Kagan describes the surge as being the surge of forces. The number of troops, not some narrowly defined role)
Page 44: Is this a plan for a permanent and unsustainable surge? No, it is a bridge to three possible landings: 1) The security situation improves within 18-24 months and we can begin going home. 2) We continue to train Iraqi Security Forces much more effectively than we could simply by embedding trainers, because they will be partnered with and fighting with our excellent soldiers. As we help improve the security situation, their quality will also improve, expediting our ability to turn responsibility for maintaining security over to them. 3) Within the time-frame of this surge we could bring new active duty formations on line if we began recruiting immediately. Those new formations would from the additional strain of the surge. (This shows the purpose of the surge clearly, and is also important. The reason for "the surge of forces into Iraq" (page 43) is to improve the security situation. So troops can begin coming home some time around June 2008 to December 2008. The time between the GOP picking their nominee and the transition between Presidents 43 and 44, in other words)
Page 45: Will this surge break the army? (Reasons are given that the surge of forces into Iraq would improve morale and indirectly help retention. Someone better tell the AEI it didn't work)
Page 48: More Casualties? Yes. As troops actively secure the population the enemy will surge its attacks on coalition troops and Iraqi civilians. (We've always known this is what the soldiers are to these fat-cats. Conservatives do the frequent flying, soldiers do the dying)
In EVERY instance, the word "surge" meant exactly what you thought it meant. A wave of people, rolling like an irresistible force over Iraq.
Who was involved in this initial briefing? Last page of the PDF shows that information.
• Frederick W. Kagan, AEI
• Jack Keane, General, U.S. Army, Retired
• David Barno, Lieutenant General, U.S. Army Retired
• Danielle Pletka, AEI
• Rend al-Rahim, Iraq Foundation
• Joel Armstrong, Colonel, U.S. Army, Retired
• Daniel Dwyer, Major, U.S. Army, Retired
• Larry Crandall
• Larry Sampler, IDA
• Michael Eisenstadt, Washington Institute
• Kimberly Kagan, Georgetown
• Michael Rubin, AEI
• Reuel Gerecht, AEI
• Thomas Donnelly, AEI
• Gary Schmitt, AEI
• Mauro de Lorenzo, AEI
• Vance Serchuk, AEI
• Molly McKew, AEI
• Laura Conniff, AEI
• Jonathan Bronitsky, AEI
• Adrian Myers, AEI
Four retired Army officers. Twelve members of the AEI. One member of AID, based in the Ronald Reagan Building, Washington DC. One from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy... John P. Hannah, a research fellow and deputy director at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, was named on October 31, 2005, by Vice President Dick Cheney to be his national security adviser. And one member of the Free Iraq Foundation: as this page reports, the Iraq Foundation was "extremely helpful" to Gulf War veteran, actor and filmmaker Archie Drury, who co-produced the film Voices of Iraq. The Foundation helped the filmmakers "figure out how to get around and who to give the cameras to," as well as providing "torture footage." Questions have been raised about the film, since it was released one week before the 2004 U.S. presidential elections (its distributor said, "If the war in Iraq is an issue that impacts your vote, you have to see this movie first"), it reportedly paints a positive picture of post-war Iraq, and the film's publicity is coordinated by Manning Selvage & Lee, the PR firm that launched the U.S. Army's "Army of One" campaign.
Now you know where "the surge" comes from, and what it was meant to convey. As defined by those on the other side of the aisle.
Part two: Language is a virus.
We have established what the word was defined as. And we have news reports to support this.
December 22, 2006. Washington Post reports "Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki told visiting Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates that he would let U.S. generals decide whether there is a need for a 'surge' in U.S. troops deployed in Iraq, according to Iraqi officials with knowledge of the meeting."
January 10, 2007. On the day Bush was to address the nation on the surge, ABC News used the term (even though, as I've shown, Bush did not in his address).
June, 2007. AFP reports "An internal US military assessment indicates that three months after the beginning of a troop 'surge' in Baghdad, the military has been able to establish tentative control over fewer than one-third of the city’s neighborhoods, The New York Times reported on its website Sunday."
In every instance, the use of the term "the surge" still meant exactly what you thought it meant. A wave of people, rolling like an irresistible force over Iraq.
Until the [f]right wing slowly started slipping instances of "the surge" = "counterinSURGEncy" into their articles.
The first recent instance I found of an increase of this using Google News was around a month ago. June 23, 2008. AllAfrica.com reported this...
The Index, a collaborative effort of Foreign Policy and the Fund for Peace (FFP), found that Somalia replaced Sudan as the world's most unstable country in 2007 after U.S.-backed Ethiopian troops routed Islamist forces which had given the strife-torn East African nation its first semblance of stability in more than 15 years.
---
The Index's compilers credited the U.S. "surge" -- the addition of some 30,000 U.S. troops and the adoption of a more aggressive counter-insurgency strategy -- in part for Baghdad's improvement over the course of the year, although it underlined, as have U.S. commanders and officials, the fragility of the country's advance.
Odd. Stating that "the surge" wasn't primarily defining the amount of people. And this came from the FFP? Who is this FFP that suddenly put the unique definition together?
This is where it gets really good.
Founded in 1967 by Randolph Parker Compton, a well-heeled liberal Republican investment banker and one worlder, the fund's mission has been not so much to finance organizations, as its name might imply, but to provide support services like bookkeeping, tax-exempt status and fiduciary management for fledgling groups.
A liberal Republican. Right up John McCain's alley. And if you look at that really good link, you'll see who funds this Fund For Peace. The kind of people that would like the US to stay in Iraq for 100 years. The ones that profited from the new Iraqi hydrocarbon law. BP Amoco. ExxonMobil. ConocoPhilips. Shell Oil.
I wondered, just for a second, if this could be some sort of orchestrated planned attempt by Conservatives to plant the words "surge" and "insurgency" together in their articles at an increased rate. Just for a second, I wondered if they were trying to redefine the definition of "the surge" in relation to Iraq.
So you know me. Any crazy idea, I do some Google searches. And cut off my bollocks and call me Ru Paul, I might have been right!
The FPP release was published on June 23. One day later, June 24. Boston Globe conservative syndicated American newspaper columnist Jeff Jacoby:
But I am not such a politician! The last thing I want is to see our country mired in a war it is doomed to lose. That's the kind of war we were fighting in Iraq before the "surge" that began in January 2007 - the revamped counterinsurgency strategy that I had been advocating for nearly four years before President Bush finally agreed to change course.
Still the same day, June 24, from Conservative pundit Andrew Sullivan adds McCain into the mix...
And unlike Rumsfeld, and other light-footprint hawks, McCain had no qualms about flooding a foreign country with as many American troops as would be required to restore order. When General David Petraeus emerged with "the surge", a counter-insurgency plan that promised some kind of reversal of Rumsfeldism, McCain leapt at it.
Two days later. June 26. This article written by Gian P Gentile...
From the surge, its most fervent advocates have extracted a single maxim: that they and only they have uncovered the secret to defeating insurgencies.
Prior to the surge, in this telling, only a few exceptional units were engaged in proper counterinsurgent operations.
Oh, and that would be "Lt. Col. Gian P. Gentile, commander of the 8th Squadron of the 10th Cavalry Regiment, which is based near a bomb-infested highway south of Baghdad" as this page states. His article has FIFTY-FIVE instances of cross-use.
I have alluded that some people have tied "surge" and "counterinsurgency" together. One such example in 2007 is from Robert Kagan, Fred Kagan's brother, in the Washington Post. Robert may have made that word connection, but the architect of the actual surge never did (as the extensive PDF of the original plan proves). Still, it must be noted that there's nothing like keeping the old neo-conservatism in the family.
Part three. One sane voice in the howling wind, and why the [f]right may want to wash their hands on what "the surge" resulted in.
Juan Cole, President of the Global Americana Institute, published an article called "A Social History of the Surge" on his website today. It makes for some good reading. Here's a snippet...
Proponents are awfully hard to pin down on what the "surge" consisted of or when it began. It seems to me to refer to the troop escalation that began in February, 2007. But now the technique of bribing Sunni Arab former insurgents to fight radical Sunni vigilantes is being rolled into the "surge" by politicians such as John McCain. But attempts to pay off the Sunnis to quiet down began months before the troop escalation and had a dramatic effect in al-Anbar Province long before any extra US troops were sent to al-Anbar (nor were very many extra troops ever sent there). I will disallow it. The "surge" is the troop escalation beginning winter of 2007. The bribing of insurgents to come into the cold could have been pursued without a significant troop escalation, and was.
Aside from defining what proponents mean by the "surge," all kinds of things are claimed for it that are not in evidence. The assertion depends on a possible logical fallacy: post hoc ergo propter hoc. If event X comes after event Y, it is natural to suspect that Y caused X. But it would often be a false assumption. Thus, actress Sharon Stone alleged that the recent earthquake in China was caused by China's crackdown on Tibetan protesters. That is just superstition, and callous superstition at that. It is a good illustration, however, of the very logical fallacy to which I am referring.
It also links to a ThinkProgress article from March where escalation architect Frederick Kagan (not to be confused with his brother Robert) repeated his claim that sectarian cleansing has not affected the drop in violence in Iraq. Kagan called it a "myth", yet the Washington Post published the maps (shown below, concentrate on the yellow areas that denote diverse neighborhoods) comparing the sectarian make-up of Baghdad’s neighborhoods in April 2006 and November 2007, and revealing the transformation of the city resulting from sectarian cleansing.
The Post's distribution of sectarian enclaves corresponds closely with graphs, provided by Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNF-I), that chart sectarian violence in Baghdad between July 2006 and July 2007, which is the period in which the U.S. military escalation, also known as the Baghdad Security Plan, took place. The August 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq also rebuts Kagan’s mythmaking. One of the NIE’s judgements was that where some "conflict levels have diminished," it was due to sectarian "separation." And Kagan’s view is also challenged by Joe Christoff of the Government Accountability Office, who stated in congressional testimony in October 2007 that sectarian cleansing was "an important consideration in even assessing the overall security situation in Iraq". Follow the ThinkProgress link for more details on how Fred had his ass handed to him.
So it's no surprise John McCain wants to change the definition of "the surge", and how his media friends want to help. The surge had nothing to do with quelling the insurgents: money did that, the al-Sadr cease-fire did that. No, what the surge did was... nothing. Other forces, players, and events have been responsible for changing the level of violence in Iraq over the last few years. If anything, it should have allowed the US to prevent ethnic cleansing, yet it happened right under the noses of everyone we have over there.
No wonder they're trying to create "truth" using the repetition of a lie.
But don't worry, McCain. We're not booing you. We're saying "it turned out boooooootifuly for you". Really, we are...