What's so great about the Surge?

Last year President Bush implemented a new strategy in Iraq -- the "surge" -- aimed at increasing security in Baghdad, and putting another 4,000 troops in the Anbar province to fight the Sunni insurgents. At first, the results didn't look too promising. When General Patraeus released his interim report on the "surge" in July 2007 coalition fatalities were at an all time high. Still, General Patraues claimed the "surge" had been moderately successful.

Since then there has been a remarkable decline in U.S fatalities, and now they are at an all time low. While the immediate reaction is to attribute this decline to the "surge" there may be other factors at work.

Conservative columnist Paul Sperry argues that the reduction in violence isn't so much due to the troops as it is the cash "bribes" we are offering to the tribal sheiks in the Anbar province. He writes:

The only, 'success' in Anbar is really just a return on U.S. financial inducements to tribal sheiks. Instead of dropping bombs in Iraq, we're now dropping bundles of cash in the laps of insurgents who without the crude bribes would no doubt return to ambushing our troops.

There is also corroborating evidence from the TimesOnline:

The Sunday Times has witnessed at first hand the enormous sums of cash changing hands. One sheikh in a town south of Baghdad was given $38,000 (£19,000) and promised a further $189,000 over three months to drive Al-Qaeda fighters from a nearby camp.

.

If these cash "bribes" are responsible for the reduction in violence then we can say that in all respects the "surge" has been a failure. Perhaps the White and military were growing weary of all the negative press coming out of Iraq and wanted to turn back the tide. The Sunni insurgency was just too difficult for us to handle, so instead we tried a new approach: bribery.

This makes me wonder that if the part about the Sunnis turning against al-Qaeda is just a cover story. Al-Qaeda's presence in Iraq is hotly debated and, I suspect, wildly inflated. In fact, I doubt al-Qaeda has any real presence in Iraq at all. Perhaps we refer to foreign "terrorists" in Iraq as al-Qaeda because most of the foreign fighters come from Saudi Arabia and Bush doesn't want to alienate one of our "allies."

However, I think the military just decided to hand out cash bribes to the Sunnis and invented the part about them turning against al-Qaeda. The military cannot just claim we are paying off the insurgents to keep the violence down, so they concocted a story to make the "bribes" appear legitimate.

This is all speculation at this point, and I invite any criticism, but we cannot trust the White House and military to tell us the truth about Iraq.