There are gaffes, and then there are Gaffes. And yesterday, John McCain made a Gaffe. Speaking with Katie Couric about Iraq on the CBS Evening News, McCain questioned the way Obama credited the Iraqis for some of the positive outcomes of the surge:
Katie Couric: Senator McCain, Senator Obama says, while the increased number of US troops contributed to increased security in Iraq, he also credits the Sunni awakening and the Shiite government going after militias. And says that there might have been improved security even without the surge. What’s your response to that?
McCain: I don’t know how you respond to something that is as—such a false depiction of what actually happened. Colonel MacFarland was contacted by one of the major Sunni sheiks. Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening. I mean, that’s just a matter of history.
Except—Gaffe!—no, that’s not a matter of history. In fact, the Anbar Awakening predated the U.S. troop surge. The surge began in February 2007; the Awakening began in the summer…of 2006. That’s just a matter of history.
Here’s Colin Kahl (h/t: Democracy Arsenal), writing in Foreign Affairs (emphasis ours):
The Awakening began in Anbar Province more than a year before the surge and took off in the summer and fall of 2006 in Ramadi and elsewhere, long before extra U.S. forces started flowing into Iraq in February and March of 2007. Throughout the war, enemy-of-my-enemy logic has driven Sunni decision-making. The Sunnis have seen three “occupiers” as threats: the United States, the Shiites (and their presumed Iranian patrons), and the foreigners and extremists in AQI. Crucial to the Awakening was the reordering of these threats.
And here’s The New York Times, writing about the Anbar Awakening on March 3, 2007 (emphasis ours):
Sheik Abdul Sattar and the Anbar Salvation Council, the group of 25 tribes that the sheik said he had helped pull together to fight Al Qaeda, would be central to any such move by the Americans.
The sheik said he and his allies, who also call themselves the Anbar Awakening, had recruited 6,000 fighters from the tribes into the Anbar police, helped appoint a new provincial police chief and formed a 2,500-member “emergency brigade” answering to him.
A United States Army civil affairs officer in Ramadi, Capt. Travis L. Patriquin, said in an e-mail message shortly before he was killed by a roadside bomb in Ramadi in December that the tribal fighters in the Iraqi police constituted “the first successful, large force of men we’ve had since the start of the war.”
And here’s another Times piece about the Awakening, also published March 3, 2007 (emphasis, again, ours):
The formation of the group in September shocked many Sunni Arabs. It was the most public stand anyone in Anbar had taken against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, which was founded by the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
And here’s Kevin Drum, writing about the Awakening in The Washington Monthly in August 2007:
The Anbar Awakening is genuinely good news, but (a) it had nothing to do with the surge, (b) it’s happening only in homogeneous Sunni areas, and (c) it involves arming and training Sunni forces who are almost certain to turn against both us and the Shiite central government as soon as they’ve finished off AQI. Pretending otherwise is simply fraudulent.
Anyway. You get the idea. Anbar Awakening™, Iraqi owned and operated since September 2006; Surge™, American owned and operated since February 2007. McCain had the events’ timing—and thus his post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc reasoning about their relationship—backwards.
It was the proto-blogger Spencer Ackerman who, yesterday evening, first identified McCain’s error. The Colonel MacFarland to whom McCain referred in the Couric interview “is now a one-star general, and his name is Sean MacFarland,” Ackerman writes. “He was commander of the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division, based in Ramadi in 2006 and early 2007 and is a key figure in embracing the Anbar Awakening before it even had that name.”
Mrs. Garber, Not that I would usually want to interrupt a “journalist”, especially one caught up in another bullshit nutroot echochamber lynching of John McCain, but lets see what one of the architects of the 2007 surge, Fred Kagan, said about this almost a year ago.
The tribal leaders in Anbar began to turn against al Qaeda in Iraq last year, largely due to unspeakable atrocities committed by the terrorists against their own hosts. Many analysts and observers have seized upon this fact to argue that the movement in Anbar had nothing to do with the surge, began before the surge did, and would continue even without the surge. This argument is invalid. Anbari tribal leaders did begin to turn against AQI in their areas last year before the surge began, but not before Colonel Sean MacFarland began to apply in Ramadi the tactics and techniques that are the basis of the current strategy in Baghdad. His soldiers and Marines fought tenaciously to establish a foothold in Anbar’s capital, which was then a terrorist stronghold, and thereby demonstrated to the local leaders that they could count on American support as they began to fight their erstwhile allies. Even so, the movement proceeded slowly and fitfully for most of 2006 and, indeed, into 2007. But when Colonel John Charlton’s brigade relieved MacFarland’s in Ramadi and was joined by two additional Marine battalions (part of the surge) elsewhere in Anbar, the “awakening” began to accelerate very rapidly. At the start of 2007 there were only a handful of Anbaris in the local security forces. By the summer there were over 14,000. Before the surge, Ramadi was one of the most dangerous cities in Iraq; now it is possible for Americans to walk through its market with limited security details and without body armor. David Kilcullen describes the relationship between the surge and the movement very well in his Small Wars Journal posting, and I have also addressed the issue in detail in a recent Weekly Standard article . The fact is that neither the surge nor the turn of the tribal leaders would in itself have been enough to turn Anbar around — both were necessary, and will remain so for some time.
Here’s a tip, next time you run to your keyboard with a “hot” story that you read while surfing the Huffington Post, TPM or Media Matters, maybe you should step back, do some research and say “do I want to sound like as much of a retard as these people?”.
Posted by TDC on Wed 23 Jul 2008 at 08:12 PM
Because an architect of the surge is a great, unbiased source to get your facts from. Seriously, I'm tired of fools like you trying to obscure reality of the situation. I suggest you do some research on Capt Travis L Patriquin before you speak another word of bull about the Anbar Awakening.
Posted by pseizure2000 on Thu 24 Jul 2008 at 11:06 AM
TDC:
I'm not clear on your objection to the article. McCain claimed that the surge "began the Anbar awakening." That's clearly not true, even according to Kagan. In fact, Kagan notes in the article you reference that:
The change in U.S. strategy announced in January 2007 and the surge of forces over the ensuing months did not create this shift in Anbar, but accelerated its development.
(The article from The Weekly Standard is here.)
Has Kagan ever claimed that the surge was justified by the Anbar awakening? I always thought it was just a fortuitous confluence of events, but my memory of the official justifications for the surge are fuzzy, and I wouldn't be surprised if the awakening was cited as a reason the surge was necessary/would be successful. This would reverse the causality chain of McCain's comments completely.
Anon
Posted by Anon on Thu 24 Jul 2008 at 11:13 AM
Anon, helping the Sunnis in Anbar was an orginal, if secondary, objective of the surge. As Bush's State of the Union address in 2007 put it:
In order to make progress toward this goal, the Iraqi government must stop the sectarian violence in its capital. But the Iraqis are not yet ready to do this on their own. So we're deploying reinforcements of more than 20,000 additional soldiers and Marines to Iraq. The vast majority will go to Baghdad, where they will help Iraqi forces to clear and secure neighborhoods, and serve as advisers embedded in Iraqi Army units. With Iraqis in the lead, our forces will help secure the city by chasing down the terrorists, insurgents, and the roaming death squads. And in Anbar Province, where al Qaeda terrorists have gathered and local forces have begun showing a willingness to fight them, we're sending an additional 4,000 United States Marines, with orders to find the terrorists and clear them out. (Applause.) We didn't drive al Qaeda out of their safe haven in Afghanistan only to let them set up a new safe haven in a free Iraq.
Neither this, nor Kagan's remarks as quoted by TDC, support McCain's statement that "it began the Anbar awakening." At best, Republicans can chalk it up to another "he knew what he was trying to say, honest he did" moment that's not quite as utterly embarrassing as the "al Qaeda training in Iran" moment.
The assertion that the Anbar awakening would have progressed as far as it did without the surge is very questionable. Regardless, beating the Sunnis in Anbar over the head with "you couldn't have done it without us" seems like a clumsy move to score American election points at the cost of winning the war in Iraq.
Posted by nate on Thu 24 Jul 2008 at 11:54 AM
You make a good point, TDC—or Fred Kagan does, anyway, in the selection you’ve quoted. (If readers are interested in checking it out, the excerpt TDC has quoted comes from a September 3, 2007 essay in The National Review, here.)
Sure, TDC, you can say that the Anbar Awakening didn’t truly pick up momentum until later in its existence—and even that the Awakening and the surge were symbiotic. But that’s changing the subject. At issue here is the start of the Anbar Awakening, not its efficacy; the issue is chronology, and—in this context, at least—nothing more nuanced than that. And the Awakening started, as a movement, in the summer and fall of 2006. Which is, as I’ve noted above, well documented.
McCain seemed to think that it started after the surge began in 2007. That’s a problem.
Now, McCain might well have had Kagan’s more nuanced take on the Awakening—namely, that it didn’t pick up force until 2007, and that that was due in part to the buildup of American forces—in his mind when talking to Couric. I sincerely hope he did; I sincerely want to believe that a man who (let’s leave aside the polls) has a 50/50 shot at becoming our next Commander in Chief understands in great detail the situation on the ground in Iraq.
But the fact remains that, whatever was in McCain’s mind at the time, what he said to Couric was factually wrong. And if his words were indicative of a more nuanced interpretation of the Awakening/surge relationship, he didn’t indicate that to Couric: he said, rather, that the surge created the Awakening—which, even in Kagan’s portrayal of events, is simply not true. Nor—and, as I said, here’s my main problem, the lack of MSM follow-up—did Couric question McCain about his comment and give him the chance to explain his reasoning in more detail. It’s an explanation I would have been keenly interested in hearing.
Now, I’m happy to see, two days after the fact, the MSM are doing what I hoped they would: questioning McCain about his statement. And here’s what he’s said about it, per the AP:
“He told reporters during an unscheduled stop in a supermarket that what the Bush administration calls ‘the surge’ was actually ‘made up of a number of components,’ some of which began before the president's order for more troops.”
In other words, TDC, McCain isn’t adopting Kagan’s (and, apparently, your) interpretation of a late-starting Awakening to explain his chronological error…but rather an interpretation of the surge that would suggest an early beginning. Which is a different point entirely.
And McCain goes on to say that we’re using the wrong definition of the term “surge”:
"A surge,” he told reporters during that same avail, “is really a counterinsurgency made up of a number of components. ... I'm not sure people understand that 'surge' is part of a counterinsurgency."
In other words, he’s trying to adopt a broader definition of the “surge”—not just the commonly accepted definition, per Newser, emphasis mine, as “a phrase commonly used to describe U.S. President George W. Bush's plan to increase the number of American troops deployed to the Iraq War to provide security to Baghdad and Al Anbar Province…that resulted in Iraqi-led initiative to secure Baghdad starting in February 2007”—but as, more generally, a “counterinsurgency.”
I don’t find McCain’s re-definition convincing; in fact, I find its glibness rather disturbing. You, I suspect, will disagree. But we don’t need to get into Defining the Surge in our comments section. The point I was making above was that the MSM needs to be following up on McCain’s errors—not only to give him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to his knowledge of Iraq, but also because voters deserve to know, in detail, about his understanding of the situation there. I’m glad they did follow up, if belatedly, in this case, and hope we’ll see much more of that type of questioning—for both candidates—between now and November.
Posted by Megan Garber on Thu 24 Jul 2008 at 12:29 PM
Megan, I would disagree with your last point and say that we should get into "defining the surge", since its definition seems to be shifting a great deal within the media as this story evolves.
I've held the cynical view since its first suggestion in early 07 that the Surge was little more than a calculated move by Bush and, yes, McCain to inoculate a continuation of the Iraqi occupation against criticism from Democrats and the left by cloaking it with the unassailable character of the troops on the ground and their highly esteemed commanders.
One need not share this suspicion to see how conveniently this has played out for McCain over a year later. Media commentators, eager to conclude the surge narrative with some kind of concrete success or failure, have accepted as gospel that the surge worked. Not once have I seen this simplistic notion questioned, defended, or fleshed out with any thorough analysis; commentators merely start from the assumption that the surge has succeeded and continue to make their points from there. Moreover, the grounds of contention appear to have been fully ceded by the Democrats, offering little promise that this concept will ever been considered for debate again.
Obama has been grudgingly complicit in this lately, as he offers what appears to be lip service to the success of the surge, but it's telling that his attempt to inject the slightest bit of nuance into the story - that the Sunni Awakening alone might be partially responsible for some of the security gains - threw the McCain camp into such hysterics. A deeper examination of who can claim what responsibility, McCain undoubtedly fears, will do nothing except cast light on the fragile security situation in Baghdad and Anbar, to say nothing of the paltry political gains made during the Surge's duration.
I wonder what can be done to put the issue of dissecting the surge's true successes back on the media's operating table. I suppose it took McCain's overzealousness in attempting to rewrite simple history to make it even a remote possibility.
Posted by Evan Woodward on Thu 24 Jul 2008 at 04:13 PM
Here's a tip, TDC, written apparently for yourself:
... maybe you should step back, do some research and say “do I want to sound like as much of a retard as these people?”
Posted by circusboy on Thu 24 Jul 2008 at 10:50 PM