Records cast doubt on Iraq 'surge'

Besides offering new details about the horrors that George W. Bush's invasion unleashed on Iraq–where a severed head could be casually tossed into a busy intersection–the nearly 400,000 pages of secret U.S. military records released by WikiLeaks show that a variety of factors beyond Bush's much-touted "surge" in 2007 contributed to the gradual drop in violence. For instance, the records suggest that the sectarian slaughter of 2006 was burning itself out largely because brutal ethnic cleansing had separated the Shiites and the Sunnis. The indiscriminate violence also had turned many Iraqis against both the excesses of al-Qaeda in Iraq and the sectarian militias. Also, in 2006, key insurgent leaders, such as al-Qaeda's Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, were killed and Sunni tribesmen in restive Anbar Province were signing up to accept American money in exchange for switching sides–all of these key developments preceding the "surge." Though the additional 30,000 U.S. troops in 2007 may have helped accelerate or consolidate these gains, the eventual drop in violence after the "surge" appears more coincidental than causal–and thus may not justify the acclaim given to President Bush and Gen. David Petraeus or the claims by neoconservative war strategists that they were vindicated. A New York Times analysis of the WikiLeaks documents lends support to the more skeptical view of the "surge," noting that the growing revulsion among Iraqis over the violence and a renewed hope for peace go a long way toward explaining why the killing slowed.