Who gets the credit?

Good point by Daniel Larison on the surge:

The point isn't that Baghdad has not become a multifaith enclave, but that it used to be something like that and was then turned into a highly segregated and divided city thanks to the mix of invasion, insecurity and sectarian-cum-democratic politics. Hence, the nightmarish violence of 2006 has subsided into merely horrible because most of the potential victims of new sectarian violence have been pushed into new parts of the country, fled to Syria and Jordan or elsewhere or were killed in the first waves. And this is dubbed success.

This was the point Klein was making here - the causes of reduced violence are many and some have nothing to do with the additional brigades, and some are the after-effects of the magnificent failure of the occupation to fulfill its obligations to secure the population of the country it ostensibly controlled. Meanwhile, "surge" defenders would very much like to credit the change in tactics with most or all of the improvements, and then allow this reduction in violence to make it seem as if something fundamental had changed about a society in which armed gangs were butchering civilians just a year and a half ago for happening to be in the wrong district. That is what I call an unpersuasive case.

The end results of sectarian ethnic cleansing in Baghdad neighborhoods, Muqtada al-Sadr's unilateral ceasefire and the Sunni chieftains' alliance against al Qaeda in Iraq are the prime factors in the somewhat reduced level of violence in Iraq. The surge in and of itself had very little to do with causing the reduction.

That said, Petreus's philosophy on how to work as an occupying force with the Iraqis should have been implemented far earlier in our occupation than it was. Had it been implemented earlier as opposed to the policies that produced Abu Ghraib, the discussions we're having today would probably be quite different.

H/T to Sully