Judging the Surge

A fascinating thing to watch over the next few weeks and months will be the Congress, the media, the Administration, the military and the American public's evaluation of how the "surge" is going. Last week there was some qualified good news about the initial American sweeps of Baghdad going more smoothly than expected. The weekend brought more bombings and then yesterday's unprecedented attack on a US installation.

The stakes in assessing the surge are high. If it fails, its hard to imagine what new tack the Administration can take that won't amount to a wholesale and tacit admission of defeat.

Progressives have, after 6 years of the Bush presidency, gotten used to being of two minds on the fate of Bush's policies: on the one hand, they want the best for US interests (and especially for US troops), mandating that they hope against hope for the surge to succeed. On the other hand, having been repeatedly and resoundingly vindicated in their critique of Bush's policy, they rightly judge that the sooner the facts on the ground make it clear to everyone that Bush's misadventures are just that, the sooner they will be forced to end.

The media and the public have grown weary of years of being spun on the supposed invisible successes of the Iraq mission, and will treat claims of progress with skepticism. With an additional 20,000 people in the field, the military may be torn between trying to keep morale up among soldiers whose tours are being extended, and not wanting to fuel the continued over-extension of US forces based on false hopes of potential victory.

One of two things will happen: either the news out of Iraq will be so consistently and grindingly bad that the Administration's policy will fall apart. Alternatively, there may be a battle of perceptions where some positive signs make it all but impossible to figure out the truth.