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Andrew Exum said the Surge succeeded. Dr. Bernard Finel says “prove it“.

From Abu Muquwama:

Just Admit It: The Surge Worked

….We can argue about how many other factors aside from U.S. diplomatic and military operations led to the stunning drop in violence in 2007. There was a civil war in 2005 and 2006, tribes from al-Anbar “flipped” in 2006, and Muqtada al-Sadr decided to keep his troops out of the fight for reasons that are still not entirely clear. Those are just three factors which might not have had anything to do with U.S. operations. But there can be no denying that a space has indeed been created for a more or less peaceful political process to take place. Acts of heinous violence still take place in Baghdad, but so too does a relatively peaceful political process.

From BernardFinel.com:

Did the Surge Succeed?

….Violence was a problem for Iraqi civilians and for the U.S. military.  Reducing violence has unquestionably served humanitarian purposes in Iraq and has also saved American lives.  But that has nothing to do with “conceptual space” or the broader “success” of the surge.

I mean, come on, if you’re going to write a post that essential expects to settle a debate like this one, snark and assertions much be balanced with rigorous analysis.  But Exum doesn’t demonstrate any real understanding of the dynamics of violence in civil conflicts.

My suggestion is that you first read each gentleman’s posts in their entirety.

The first part of the dispute would be what is the standard of “success” that we are going to use to evaluate “the Surge”. I’m not certain that Exum and Finel, both of whom are experts in areas of national security and defense, would easily arrive at a consensus as to what that standard of measurement would be. Perhaps if they sat across from one another at a table and went back and forth for an hour or so. Or perhaps not. I have even less confidence that folks whose interests are primarily “gotcha” type partisan political point-scoring on the internet, rather than defense or foreign policy, could agree on a standard. Actually, I think people of that type would go to great lengths to avoid doing so but without agreement on a standard or standards the discussion degenerates into people shouting past one another.

In my view, “the Surge” was as much about domestic political requirements of the Bush administration after November 2006 as it was about the situation on the ground in Iraq. In my humble opinion, COIN was a better operational paradigm that what we had been doing previously in Iraq under Rumsfeld and Bremer, but the Bush administration accepted that change in military policy only out of desperation, as a life preserver. That isn’t either good or bad, it simply means that measuring the Surge is probably multidimensional and the importance of particular aspects depends on who you are. An Iraqi shopkeeper or insurgent has a different view from a USMC colonel or a blogger-political operative like Markos Moulitsas Zúñiga. Ultimately, the standard selected involves a level of arbitrary judgment. I can say the Surge was a success because the US was not forced to execute a fighting withdrawal from Iraq as some, like William Lind, was likely to happen but that’s probably not a narrow enough standard to measure the Surge fairly.

The second part of the dispute involves methodological validity, or “rigor” in making the evaluation, which was raised by Dr. Finel. I agree with Finel that in intellectual debate, rigor is a good thing. Generally in academia, where social scientists frequently suffer from a bad case of “physics envy”, this means unleashing the quants to build a mathematical model to isolate the hypothetical effects of a particular variable. I freely admit that I am not certain how this could be done in a situation as complex as the Iraqi insurgency-counterinsurgency in 2007 and still retain enough reliability to relate to reality. The act of isolating one variable is itself a gross distortion of the reality of war. There would have to be some kind of reasonable combination of quantitative and qualitative methods here to construct an argument that is comprehensive, rigorous and valid. I think Bernard should propose what that combination might be in approximate terms.

The third part of the dispute involves the medium for the rigorous argument over the Surge. I’d suggest that, generally, a blog post is not going to cut it for reasons intrinsic to the medium. First, blog posts have an unspoken requirement of brevity due the fact that audience reads them on a computer screen. While you can say something profound in just a few words, assembling satisfactory evidentiary proofs in a scholarly sense requires more space – such as that provided by a journal article or book. Blogging is good for a fast-paced exchange of ideas, brainstorming, speculation and, on occasion, investigative journalism. It’s a viral, dynamic medium. While there are examples of bloggers rising to levels of greater intellectual depth, these are exceptions rather than the rule in the blogosphere.

This is not a dispute that is going to be resolved because the parties are unlikely to find a common ground on which they can agree to stand.

HNN is running a symposium on Jonah Goldberg’s recent book, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning:

While I know a great deal about the historical period in question, I have not read Goldberg’s book, so I am not going to comment on his core proposition except to say that IMHO, I tend to find arguments that the intellectual roots of Fascism and Nazism are located exclusively on one side of the political spectrum are flatly and demonstrably wrong. Goldberg’s polemical thesis though, yields a hysterical reaction because he is jubilantly shredding the hoary (and false) assertion of the academic Left, going back to the pre-Popular Front Communist Party line of the 1930’s, that Fascism is a form of radicalized conservatism and a secret pawn of big business capitalism.

Therefore, the following series amounts to an intellectual food fight between Goldberg and (mostly) a band of clearly enraged Leftist professors. Enjoy!:

HNN Special: A Symposium on Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism

• Neiwert: Introduction
• Paxton: The Scholarly Flaws
• Griffin: An Academic Book – Not!
• Feldman: Poor Scholarship, Wrong Conclusions
• Berlet: The Roots of the Book
• Michael Ledeen Responds to Liberal Fascism
• Goldberg: Definitions and Double Standards
• Feldman: An Open Letter to Mr. Jonah Goldberg
• Griffin: Definitions and Double Standards – A Rebuttal
• Neiwert: Goldberg’s Response Fits His History of Evasion

After all, who doesn’t like an intemperate, online argument about Nazs? 🙂

It’s not every day I hear a military analyst hope for the execution of one of our own soldiers captured by the Taliban. Even the FOXnews anchor babe, psuedo-journalist looks like she’s trying to find her jaw on the floor when Peters finishes his rant.

Was Peters on crack during the taping of this segment? WTF?

This caught my eye, from Foreign Affairs:

Jonestown: Will Obama’s National Security Council Be “Dramatically Different?”

But Jones remains something of a question mark. The most successful national security advisers — McGeorge Bundy, Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, and Sandy Berger — were effective thanks to strong personal and policy relationships with their presidents, and it remains unclear whether Jones will establish a similarly close connection with Obama. The retired marine general has garnered widespread bipartisan respect for his integrity, but he had met Obama only twice before being appointed to the job.

History suggests that this is not an insuperable obstacle: Bundy built his relationship with Kennedy, and Kissinger his with Nixon, only after moving to the White House. But both Bundy and Kissinger immersed themselves in the substance of presidential policy, and their operational styles (Bundy’s was open and casual, while Kissinger’s was tight and controlled) were natural fits for their respective bosses.

Jones’s personal style does not seem to be so good a match for Obama’s. Jones is a career military man accustomed to operating within a hierarchical structure, where rank matters and information and recommendations move through predictable channels. Even at its most structured, policy-making in the White House is never like this, and it appears to be particularly far from it under this president. For Jones, Bundy’s experience may be the most relevant, since Obama resembles Kennedy more than any other U.S. president since World War II. He is cool, cerebral, and substance-oriented.  Like Kennedy, he is a former senator and accustomed to informal processes, going to individuals rather than large organizations for advice. As a onetime community organizer, he has had additional experience with fluid situations that Kennedy never had. And as a former law professor, Obama is attracted to disputation as a means of garnering facts and making decisions instead of relying on the counsel, however well grounded, of a single aide, or having others’ views channeled through a particular aide

This would seem to be a misreading of the situation to me.

Gen. Jones, first of all, is not Al Haig or some general out of Hollywood central casting. He is forceful, a useful trait as President Obama intends to hold tight control over foreign policy, but Jones’ career was marked both by innovative thinking and the holding of high posts unusual for a Marine general officer, including leadership of humanitarian and multinational intervention and supreme allied commander in Europe. Excellent preparation for the sort of foreign policy problems the Obama administration is most likely to face – complex, disorderly, subnational and/failed state and with heavy diplomatic-political implications as well as shooting wars of insurgency, COIN and terrorism.

President Obama spent most of his time before becoming chief executive on a limited number of domestic policy issues, constitutional law and navigating the treacherous waters of Chicago politics. Neither foreign policy nor military affairs was an area of interest or expertise for Barack Obama and the presence of General Jones at the NSC is politically useful in itself, as is Jones’ determination to rein in the bureaucracies at meetings of NSC principals or their deputies. Making Jones both enforcer and consigliere  – but also one who has enormous “street cred” in the national security-defense communities.

ADDENDUM:

Matt Armstrong is discussing consolidation and revamping at the NSC.

Being a wingnut after an election victory that eventually causes acute moral retardation?  She sounded a whole lot like Mel Gibson’s father talking about “the Jews”.