The Successful Surge
The apparent success of the surge in Iraq is definitely something that has been overlooked in the media today. This overlook (or intentional ignoring) of our success is regretful because, as Michael Barone explains, there are many lessons we can learn from the surge. Here is just one of the lessons Barone gives in this article:
Lesson two is that societies can more easily be transformed from the bottom up than from the top down. Bush’s critics are still concentrating on the failure of the central Iraqi government to reach agreement on important issues — even though the oil revenues are already being distributed to the provinces. We persuaded the Iraqis to elect their parliament from national party lists (reportedly so that it would include more women) rather than to elect them from single-member districts that would have elected community leaders more in touch with local opinion.
But the impetus for change has come from the bottom up, from tribal sheiks in Anbar province who got tired of the violence and oppression of al Qaeda in Iraq, from Shiites and Sunnis who, once confident of the protection of American forces and of the new Iraqi military, decided to quit killing each other. They did not wait for orders from Baghdad or for legislation to be passed with all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed.
Our own recent history should have taught us that bottom-up transformation, in local laboratories of reform, can often achieve results that seemed impossible to national leaders. At the beginning of the 1990s we seemed to have intractable problems of high crime and welfare dependency. Experts argued that we couldn’t hope for improvement. But state and local leaders got to work and showed that change for the better was possible. They included Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson on welfare and New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani on crime control and many others, mostly Republicans but many Democrats as well. The federal government came charging in only after success was achieved in states and cities across the country. By now welfare dependency and crime have fallen by more than half, and they have virtually disappeared as political issues.
As the article states in the last paragraph, the success of the surge in Iraq is definitely “something to be thankful for as the new year begins.”
