Surge: Feel the Rush!

My fellow Soros minion Spencer Ackerman, now fully moved in at Minnesota Monitor's sister publication the Washington Independent, has taken a look at how the surge is doing these days. You remember, the surge? Won us Iraq finally, after our long nightmare of not winning Iraq? Stopped all violence? Has completely transformed Iraq into a paradise with flowers and chirping birds and butterflies and candy and democracy, whisky, sexy? That surge? Yeah, turns out those may not be permanent gains:

It used to be that surge enthusiasts would at least hint at the unachieved strategic objective of the surge. As Bush himself put it, the surge was meant to provide the Iraqi government "the breathing space it needs to make progress" on sectarian reconciliation. But reconciliation hasn’t happened, and, in important respects, sectarianism has deepened over the past year. So surgeniks are now simply declaring victory by the sheer fact of reduced violence itself, unmoored to any strategic goal.

But even accepting that lowered standard, there are growing signs of backsliding in Iraq—even before the surge brigades depart in July.

You mean that John McCain's unquestionably brilliant strategery to win the war in Iraq isn't working? No!

The Sunni insurgency, all but decimated in the imagination of the surge advocates, has demonstrated something of a surge of its own in recent weeks. Baghdad, Anbar and Diyala provinces, the hotbeds of the insurgency, have seen a return of high-profile suicide bombing. Prominent collaborators with the U.S., like the so-called "Concerned Local Citizens" militias, have been targeted for death by insurgents and terrorists. "Of late, though, as you’ve been seeing, is certainly an increase in the number of suicide events that occur with individuals, mostly with a suicide vest wrapped around their waist," Adm. Greg Smith, a spokesman for Multi-National Force-Iraq, said in a blogger conference call last week.

Iraq security statistics over the past 13 weeks, obtained exclusively by The Washington Independent, tell the tale. In Baghdad, improvised-explosive device (IED) detonations explosions in Baghdad have ticked up slightly to 131 in January from 129 in December—and the last week of January is not included in these latest figures. Countrywide, there was an increase in IED explosions to 2,291 in December from 1,394 in November, followed by a dip to 1,270 in the first three weeks of January. But the week ending on January 25 saw seven suicide explosions Iraq-wide, the most since the week ending Dec. 21, 2007.

Ackerman has always been a good reporter, and he's careful to remind us that one month does not a trend make. But this is indeed troubling. No, the surge hasn't done what it was supposed to do -- allow for real, concrete improvement in the Iraqi government's ability to govern -- but since it at least tamped down violence, it had some salutary effect. But if it only tamped down violence temporarily then it was, unquestionably, a total and abject failure. If these trends continue, those of us who opposed the surge in the first place will be proven right. Frankly, I was hoping to be proven wrong.