The Surge Makes the Enemy Stronger

It's a bad sign for the Bush surge strategy in Iraq is that Joe Lieberman has an op-ed in the Washington Post saying how well it's going. Lieberman's credibility has been falling to Bush-like depths since he came out as a full-throated neo-conservative after he got re-elected last November. Today, Lieberman makes the extremely thin argument that the surge is succeeding on two fronts--that Sunnis are joining the government cause in Anbar province and that the Shiite militias have been suppressed.

Of course, the Shiite militias have not been oppressed. The militias themselves decided to stand down rather than fight the new American arrivals in January. They may still decide to fight or they might decide to wait out the surge in the hope that the U. S. will wipe out the Sunni insurgents.

Unfortunately, that's not happening.

Lieberman mentions the 170 people killed by car bombs last week and blames the attacks on al-Qaida. But al-Qaeda only has 1,200 or so fighters in Iraq. The rest of the Sunni insurgents are an extremely diverse group of Sunni nationalist fighters, local guys, fundamentalist patriots, and relatively unaffiliated foreign fighters from the rest of the Arab world, Bosnia, and Chechnya.

And the Sunni insurgents have gotten stronger since the beginning of the surge because they no longer have to contend with the Shiite militias defending Shiite neighborhoods or Shiite death squads invading Sunni neighborhoods. During the 9 months of sectarian warfare after the bombing of the Samarra shrine, the militias got the upper hand on all the Sunni insurgents. But now that the Shiite militias have stood down, the Sunni insurgents are stronger and much more free to act than they were before the surge.

The surge is just like the original invasion. It's making the enemy stronger.