{"id":28471,"date":"2017-03-12T06:56:05","date_gmt":"2017-03-12T14:56:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=28471"},"modified":"2017-03-12T06:56:05","modified_gmt":"2017-03-12T14:56:05","slug":"the-iraqi-surge-and-alternative-facts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2017\/03\/12\/the-iraqi-surge-and-alternative-facts\/","title":{"rendered":"The Iraqi Surge and Alternative Facts"},"content":{"rendered":"

Donald Trump and Kellyanne Conway didn’t invent alternative facts. The U.S. government has been peddling those for decades. Consider the recent history of the Iraq War. Recall that in 2002 it was a \u201cslam dunk<\/a>\u201d case that Iraq had active programs to develop weapons of mass destruction (WMD). (We couldn\u2019t allow the smoking gun to become a mushroom cloud, said Condoleezza Rice<\/a>.) In 2003, President George W. Bush landed on an aircraft carrier and declared that major combat operations were over in Iraq \u2013 mission accomplished! And in 2007, the \u201csurge\u201d orchestrated by General David Petraeus was sold<\/a> as snatching victory from the jaws of defeat in Iraq. All of those are \u201calternative facts.\u201d All were contradicted by the facts on the ground.<\/p>\n

Nowadays, most people admit Iraq had no active WMD programs in 2002 and that the mission wasn\u2019t accomplished in 2003, but the success of the surge in 2007 is still being sold as truth, notes Danny Sjursen<\/a> at TomDispatch.com. Sjursen, who participated in the surge as a young Army lieutenant, notes that it did succeed in temporarily reducing sectarian violence in Iraq, but that was precisely the problem: it was temporary. The surge was supposed to allow space for a stable and representative Iraqi government to emerge, but that never happened.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

A short-term tactical success, the surge was a strategic failure in the long-term. Partly this was because long-term success was never in American hands to achieve, and it certainly wasn\u2019t attainable by US military action alone. In sum, the blood and treasure spilled in Iraq was for naught. But that harsh truth hasn\u2019t stopped the surge from becoming a myth of US military triumph, one that led to another unsuccessful surge, this time in Afghanistan<\/a> in 2009-10, also conducted by General Petraeus.<\/p>\n

These surges sustain an alternative fact that the US military can \u201cwin\u201d messy insurgencies and sectarian\/ethnic wars, whether in Iraq or Afghanistan or Libya or Yemen or elsewhere. They contribute to hubris and the idea we can remake the world by using our military, a belief that President Trump and his bevy of generals (all veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan) seem to share and want to put into practice again. This time, they promise<\/a> to get it right.<\/p>\n

The President and the Pentagon are currently considering<\/a> sending several thousand more troops to Afghanistan. This mini-surge is being advertised as America\u2019s best chance of defeating terrorists in the AfPak region. Even though previous, and much bigger, surges in Iraq and Afghanistan were failures, the alternative fact narrative of \u201csuccessful\u201d surges remains compelling, even authoritative, among US national security experts. They may grudgingly admit that, yes, those previous surges weren\u2019t quite perfect, but we\u2019ve learned from those \u2013 promise!<\/p>\n

Prepare for more troop deployments and more surges, America. And for more \u201cvictories\u201d as alternative facts, as in lies.<\/p>\n

William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF). He taught history for fifteen years at military and civilian schools and blogs at Bracing Views<\/a>. He can be reached at wastore@pct.edu<\/a>. Reprinted from Bracing Views<\/a> with the author’s permission.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Donald Trump and Kellyanne Conway didn’t invent alternative facts. The U.S. government has been peddling those for decades. Consider the recent history of the Iraq War. Recall that in 2002 it was a \u201cslam dunk\u201d case that Iraq had active programs to develop weapons of mass destruction (WMD). (We couldn\u2019t allow the smoking gun to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":290,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-28471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/290"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28471"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28471\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28473,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28471\/revisions\/28473"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28471"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=28471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}