Right-wing articles are very entertaining. Did you know that we won the Iraq War?
I didn't.
At least Bush won Iraq before Obama lost Iraq.
I've discovered from reading right-wing sources that Iraq was perfectly fine until President Obummer fouled it up.

Let's forget for a moment that there is a difference between "winning" and "won". As a fan of Sunday football, my team is often winning the game, but unfortunately they play four quarters.
It also just so happens that Obama managed to retroactively go back in time and lose the Iraq War, two years after we pulled our troops out. Which means we "lost" the war after the fans had already gone home.

There's just one little problem with this idea that Bush won the Iraq War.
That problem is the word "won".

You see, normally people can't declare a war to be "won" until the enemy is defeated and the fighting is over.
When you try to apply the word "won" to the Iraq War you run into two issues:
a) the enemy wasn't defeated, and
b) the fighting wasn't over.

For starters, 395 troops died after The Surge ended in 2008.

Then there is the case of defeating enemies.
Let's take just one example: Kata'ib Hezbollah.
The Bush Administration put them on the State Department list of terrorist organizations in 2007.

Kata'ib Hezbollah (Battalions of the Party of God) made a name for themselves by launching dozens of IED-roadside bombing attacks against coalition forces between 2007 and 2011, and then broadcast videos of the attacks on television.
The image on the right is from an IED attack against an American vehicle in 2011.

Kata'ib Hezbollah reason for being created was to kill American occupation soldiers, although it impossible to say just how many Americans KH has killed.
In June of 2011, KH launched a rocket attack on a Baghdad base that killed five American soldiers and later in that same month killed three more Americans in another rocket attack.

Kata'ib Hezbollah is just one of the groups that Bush "defeated" but no one told them.

Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq (aka "League of the Righteous"), founded in 2006, claimed 6,000 attacks on U.S. forces.
Their most famous was the Karbala provincial headquarters raid, where they kidnapped four American soldiers and then later executed them.
Another is the Promise Day Brigade, founded in 2008.
On just one day, June 28, 2011, the PDB attacked U.S. troops 10 times. Three Americans were killed in those attacks.

I singled out these three groups because they are three of the most important Shia militias, with over 130,000 members, that Baghdad is using in their war against ISIS.
Those "defeated" terrorists are the most powerful armies in Iraq today.

The thing I can't figure out is how the Republican Party, which firmly believes that the only way to conduct wars is to kill the bad guys until there are no more bad guys to kill, can declare the Iraq War "won" at the end of The Surge, when obviously we hadn't killed all the bad guys.
The bad guys weren't even aware that they were losing.

Even when you use Republican math, this doesn't add up. It requires Orwellian double-think.

Another thing that gets unexamined is how Bush "won" the Iraq war.
It was all about The Surge.

“I think that the surge has succeeded in ways that nobody anticipated. It’s succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.”
- President Obama

The Myth of the Surge goes something like this:

Against political pressure from the Democratic Surrender-Monkeys, Heroic President Bush added 20,000 troops, and extended the duration of the troops already in Iraq temporarily.
In response, the Iraqi terrorists were defeated, the war was won, and freedom triumphed over Democrats.

Or something like that.
Why after four years of fighting a temporary 20% increase in troops was supposed to accomplish this was never explained, and never will be.

“The surge didn’t ‘win’ anything. It bought time.”
-retired Lieutenant General Daniel Bolger

The reality is that violence continued to escalate for months until three things happened:
1) Muqtada_al-Sadr ordered his shia militias to stand down in late August when fighting between the various shia factions started getting out of control.
2) The ethnic cleansing of Baghdad was largely over by mid-2007.
It should be noted that America had a hand in that as well. Not in a good way.

“Just before Petraeus and Steele left Iraq in September 2005, Jabr al-Solagh was appointed as the new minister of the interior. Under Solagh, who was closely associated with the violent Badr Brigades militia, allegations of torture and brutality by the commandos soared. It was also widely believed that the units had evolved into death squads.
The Guardian has learned that high-ranking Iraqis who worked with the US after the invasion warned Petraeus of the consequences of appointing Solagh but their pleas were ignored.
The long-term impact of funding and arming this paramilitary force was to unleash a deadly sectarian militia that terrorised the Sunni community and helped germinate a civil war that claimed tens of thousands of lives. At the height of that sectarian conflict, 3,000 bodies a month were strewn on the streets of Iraq.” (“Revealed: Pentagon’s link to Iraqi torture centres”, Guardian)

However, the biggest change to happen is the one thing that almost never gets talked about - 3) we put the Sunni rebels on our payroll.
Or to put it another way:
We paid them not to shoot at us.

The Awakening groups emerged in 2005 when Sunni tribesmen, who had previously fought the US military and Iraqi government forces, allied with US forces, accepting arms, money and training.
There are about 100,000 Awakening fighters in Iraq and analysts say they are one of the main reasons for the recent marked reduction in violence in the country.

The insurgents became allies.
The Surge was supposed to buy time for some reconciliation between the Sunnis and Shias. It was a stated goal. “A successful strategy for Iraq goes beyond military operations,” then-President George W. Bush said.

That never happened.

With the passage of time, the “surge” should be seen as a well-intentioned attempt to staunch the violence temporarily and let President Bush hand the problem off to his successor. Hawks will undoubtedly try to pin the blame on Obama by claiming that we were (finally) winning by the time Bush left office, in the hope that Americans have forgotten the strategic objectives that the “surge” was supposed to achieve. It’s a bogus argument, but what would you expect from the folks who got us in there in the first place?

Rolling Stone magazine had an article back in 2008 that explained exactly what was happening and what was going to happen.

There is little doubt what will happen when the massive influx of American money stops: Unless the new Iraqi state continues to operate as a vast bribing machine, the insurgent Sunnis who have joined the new militias will likely revert to fighting the ruling Shiites, who still refuse to share power.

"We are essentially supporting a quasi-feudal devolution of authority to armed enclaves, which exist at the expense of central government authority," says Chas Freeman, who served as ambassador to Saudi Arabia under the first President Bush. "Those we are arming and training are arming and training themselves not to facilitate our objectives but to pursue their own objectives vis-a-vis other Iraqis. It means that the sectarian and ethnic conflicts that are now suppressed are likely to burst out with even greater ferocity in the future."

The problem with this article is that it doesn't understand that Bush won the war. It considers actual facts and reality, which is a no-no in American politics.
American politics is about framing an argument, and the Myth of the Surge papers over a lot of problems.

For Americans, the myth of the victorious surge is so seductive because it perpetuates an illusion of control. It frames the Iraq War as something other than a geostrategic blunder and remembers our effort as something more than a stalemate. What’s more, it reinforces the notion that it’s possible to influence events around the world, if only military force is deployed properly. It’s a myth that makes victory in the current Iraq mission appear achievable.

There was indeed a dramatic decline in violence during The Surge. Republicans like to say it was because of a small, temporary bump in troops numbers.
But what did Iraqis think?

In 2008, only 4 percent of Iraqis said additional US forces were responsible for the decline in violence.

The poll also found that 61% of Iraqis thought that the presence of American troops actually worsening the security situation.
But then what do they know. They only lived there.

Allow me to tell you exactly how this goes:

1) We easily defeat Saddam's armies by bribing his generals

2) We de-Baathify the country and thus cause tens of thousands of families to lose their sole source of income. They start shooting at us.

3) We put the Sunni insurgents on our payroll (see above) and they stop shooting at us.

4) In 2009, the Iraqi government disbanded the Sunni Awakening, but continued to offer them jobs until 2013.

5) The Sunni Awakening has decided to cut deals with ISIS rather than fight them in 2014. What's more, ISIS often pays more to fight for them than other jobs in the area.

When you look at it from a monetary perspective this looks very logical. Give people money and jobs so that they can live like human beings and they don't shoot at you.

“In Washington, conventional wisdom translated these events into a simple view: The surge had worked. But the full story was more complicated. At least three other factors were as important as, or even more important than, the surge.”
- Bob Woodward

Let's not forget the Republican "fact" about how Obummer lost the War in Iraq.
If only we left a few thousand soldiers in Iraq, like Mitt Romney wanted to, it would have somehow prevented the Iraqi army from collapsing against ISIS. According to a 2011 Time magazine article, Obama wanted to leave 3,000 trainers in Iraq to support the Iraqi army, but the Iraqi government wouldn't consider it.

The most obvious problem with that narrative: We have had 3,000 trainers in Iraq for the last six months, and the Iraqi army just collapsed against ISIS at Ramadi.

The obvious conclusion: leaving thousands of American troops in Iraq to train and support the corrupt Iraqi army wouldn't have made a lick of difference.

There is a big, BIG, BIG problem with this myth of The Surge and how Obama lost Iraq: it is a lie that leads us straight back into a war in Iraq that we can't win.