What is “The Surge”?

Republican presidential hopeful John McCain has been criticizing Barack Obama this week for not supporting “the surge.” In a controversially edited interview on CBS News on Tuesday, McCain took Obama to task for saying that the so-called Anbar Awakening should be credited for helping to decrease violence in Iraq over the last 18 months. According to McCain “the surge” was responsible for the Anbar Awakening:

I don’t know how you respond to something that is such a false depiction of what actually happened. Colonel McFarlane (phonetic) 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.

Unfortunately, as critics would later point out, McCain chose exactly the wrong time to invoke the word “history.” The awakening began in late 2006, at least three months before President Bush went to Congress and the American people in January of 2007 to announce a new strategy in Iraq. This strategy had a working title of “A New Way Forward” but became generally known in the press and with the American people as “The Surge.” Given that it wasn’t announced, much yet implemented when the awakening began, McCain is horrendously wrong, right?

Not according to McCain. For him, “The Surge” is not just the escalation of troops that Bush requested in January 2007, it’s the entire counter-insurgency strategy that includes the Anbar Awakening and other efforts to include Sunni tribal leaders:

And the new counterinsurgency ‘surge’ entailed going in, and clearing and holding, which Col. MacFarland had already started doing. And then of course later on, there were additional troops. And Gen. Petraeus has said that the surge would not have worked and the Anbar Awakening would not have taken place — successfully — if they hadn’t had an increase in the number of troops. So, I’m not sure, frankly, that people really understand, that a surge is part of a counterinsurgency strategy, which means going in, clearing, holding, building, building a better life, providing services to the people, and then, clearly, a part of that, an important part of that, was additional troops to ensure the safety of the sheikhs, to regain control of Ramadi, which was a very bloody fight, and then the surge continued to succeed in that counterinsurgency.

So let’s assume for the sake of argument that McCain is right: “The Surge” was not just the troop escalation, it was the entire strategy that started in 2006. If that’s true, then he shouldn’t say that Barack Obama “opposed the surge” because he only opposed the troop escalation part. John McCain wants “the surge” to mean two different things in order to cover his ass for his poor grasp of the history while simultaneously using it to criticize his opponent for opposing it. Unfortunately, McCain has failed at both and, in the process, revealed that the new John McCain will resort to the kind of tactics patented by Karl Rove and the Bush administration.