# Posted 11:08 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

ANY HOPE FOR THE SURGE? David Brooks made the case for hope last Friday on the NewsHour:

If you take a look at what's actually happening in Iraq -- and I'm not someone who is super charged up about the surge -- nonetheless, we've had the oil law recently. We've had a real cleaning-out of the interior ministry. We've had some cooperation from Anbar. We've had quieting down in Sadr City, and now our troops can go into these areas.

It seems to me the events of the last couple weeks lead you to think let's give it a chance. And we'll know, as I say, in a few months whether it works or not.

Interestingly, there was no rebuttal from Mark Shields, who represents the liberal perspective on the NewsHour's Friday broadcasts. (And Taylor, what say you? Is Brooks looking at the right metrics for success?)

Bob Kagan made a similar case for the surge in his recent column in the WaPo:

Leading journalists have been reporting for some time that the war was hopeless, a fiasco that could not be salvaged by more troops and a new counterinsurgency strategy. The conventional wisdom in December held that sending more troops was politically impossible after the antiwar tenor of the midterm elections. It was practically impossible because the extra troops didn't exist. Even if the troops did exist, they could not make a difference...

The number of security tips about insurgents that Iraqi civilians provide has jumped sharply. Stores and marketplaces are reopening in Baghdad, increasing the sense of community. People dislocated by sectarian violence are returning to their homes. As a result, "many Baghdadis feel hopeful again about the future, and the fear of civil war is slowly being replaced by optimism that peace might one day return to this city," [Iraqi bloggers Omar and Muhammad Fadhil] report. "This change in mood is something huge by itself."

Unfortunately, some of the debate about Kagan's argument has been diverted toward the question of whether he should've disclosed that his brother and sister-in-law were involved in planning and promotion the surge. According to Andrew Sullivan,

The Washington Post should have disclosed that the plan Kagan is assessing was authored by by his brother and sister-in-law, Fred and Kimberly Kagan. If that isn't a conflict of interest that requires disclosure, what is?

I'm no lawyer, but I tend to think of conflicts of interest in financial terms. For example, it is a conflict of interest for a judge to preside over a lawsuit brought against a firm owned by his brother and sister-in-law. Perhaps some of you lawyers out there can elaborate on this point.

In contrast, no one expects op-ed columnists to be neutral judges of the political situation. Regardless, I think it would've been wiser for Kagan to mention his personal connection to the surge.

When it comes to the substance of Kagan's argument, Sullivan links to Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald, who cites a very optimistic editorial from the Weekly Standard, circa March 2004, in order to demonstrate Kagan has record of premature optimism when it comes to Iraq:

A year has passed since the invasion of Iraq, and while no sensible person would claim that Iraqis are safely and irrevocably on a course to liberal democracy, the honest and rather remarkable truth is that they have made enormous strides in that direction...We may have turned a corner in terms of security.

What's more, there are hopeful signs that Iraqis of differing religious, ethnic, and political persuasions can work together. This is a far cry from the predictions made before the war by many, both here and in Europe, that a liberated Iraq would fracture into feuding clans and unleash a bloodbath.

Clearly, that isn't how things have turned out. Yet as I've said in defense of my own flawed optimistm, sectarian violence has not prevailed because it is the natural state of affairs, but because the Sunni insurgents committed atrocity after atrocity in the explicit hope of provoking a civil war that would overwhelm American efforts to promote democracy and peace. We just weren't ready for that and weren't flexible enough to respond.

But just because the optimists (myself) included have been wrong before, it is serious mistake to conclude that such analysis is dishonest. For example, Greenwald's criticism of Kagan descends into a flurry of groundless ad hominem attacks:

No rational person would believe a word Robert Kagan says about anything. He has been spewing out one falsehood after the next for the last four years in order to blind Americans about the real state of affairs concerning the invasion...

He is completely liberated from any obligation to tell the truth and is a highly destructive propagandist whose public record of commentary about Iraq ought to disqualify him from decent company, let alone some sort of pretense to expertise about this war.

Yet in his rather lengthy post, Greenwald provides no evidence of mendacity, only of errors. Thus, his writing amounts to a sad example of how vindictive partisanship results in reckless vilification and dangerous efforts to shut down rational debate. That is the kind of behavior that doesn't belong in decent company.

Now let me state for the record, as I have before, that I spent 12 months as Kagan's research assistant. Thus, I can report first hand that he demonstrated only courtesy and respect to those with whom he disagreed. In other words, he set the kind of example from which those like Mr. Greenwald have much to learn.

Labels: David Brooks, Iraq, Robert Kagan, surge

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