About that Surge ...

The Surge - that extra 30,000 U.S. troops sent to Iraq last year - worked, and Barack Obama obviously was wrong to have opposed it. Right?
Not so fast.
"Obama won’t admit a mistake, because he is a smart guy – capable of understanding that foreign policy analysis can't be popped out of a cereal box like a plastic decoder ring. He gets that the drop in violence resulted from a convergence of events 'on the ground' that had as much to do with paying our former enemies to stop fighting us, the so-called 'Anbar Awakening' that started before The Surge and the sectarian cleansing, as it did with the insertion of 30,000 more US troops into Iraq. Plus, Maliki found a way to ensure that his own militia – the Iraqi Army, plus an assist from the the Iranian-backed Badr Brigade –won the war of competing Shia factions in Basra and elsewhere, and Sadr's milita in Baghdad is still lying low in a likely shrewd political calculation ..."
Then there's a host of other things to consider. Like, for instance, whether Afghanistan (where Al Qaida was, after all) shouldn't have been (and still be) a greater priority. And whether sending still more troops to bolster the occupation of Iraq might further inflame anti-American sentiment in the Islamic world. And whether the occupiers can claim success when millions of Iraqis remain displaced from their homes, countless Iraqi families are still in grief from losing parents and children to violence, and the country is divided in three.
Of course, the Republicans demanding Obama cop to his "mistake" on The Surge never touch on those inconvenient truths.
Whether The Surge truly has been a success seems debatable, to say the least.