Bush and the Surge: Inside the Decision Making Process of the Presidency
There is a new article in the Weekly Standard on How Bush Decided on the Surge
that provides the image of an deeper, more insightful president than the simpletons in the press normally portray.
What is most interesting to me is that the surge was put in place based on the recommendations of the younger advisors and ran contrary to the advice of many high-power groups, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who favored (bluntly) acceptance of failure and ordered withdrawal, the Baker Commission which also favored a draw-down and withdrawal, and the State Departments plan of contain and surround the war zones, and just the two sides fight it out until there was a clear victor.
What Bush had to convince these various groups of was that the price of failure was greater than the cost that the surge presented, that a strategy of wait until Iraq stepped up would fail, that our troops needed to leave the Vietnam-styled pattern of “control and release” (whereby we grabbed a target, then failed to occupy it after gaining control), and so forth.
Probably the part that took the most guts was getting in front of America and a skeptical Democrat-controlled Congress and making the the case for a change in strategy that involved committing additional resources at a time when many felt the situation was beyond repair:
The 20-minute speech on January 10, 2007, was not Bush’s most eloquent. And it wasn’t greeted with applause. Democrats condemned the surge and Republicans were mostly silent. Polls showing strong public opposition to the war in Iraq were unaffected.
But the president, as best I could tell, wasn’t looking for affirmation. He was focused solely on victory in Iraq. The surge may achieve that. And if it does, Bush’s decision to spurn public opinion and the pressure of politics and intensify the war in Iraq will surely be regarded as the greatest of his presidency.
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The Whistler
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Doug Leier