The Surge Ten Years On

Ten years ago the most important battle in the Iraq Surge was raging across the southern part of the country.

It's remarkable to us that no where have we seen anybody mentioning the surge or this battle. Certainly not the media, whose silence on the matter confirms that we won the Battle of Iraq. After all they still wont shut up about the Vietnam War, a conflict they helped lose. 

Anyhoo for those who may not recall, the Surge was President Bush's final effort to force a victory in Iraq. It was the last ditch effort, it came down to the triarii as the Romans would say.

Actually, even before the Surge the tide began to turn the summer of 2006, with the assassination of abu Musab al Zarqawi. There followed the gradual turn of the Sunni tribes in Anbar and the formation of the Anbar Awakening Tribal Council. In a few months the Sunni militias did what the US Army and Marines couldn't do in three years. They flushed out al-Qaida.

From there a half dozen fresh army brigades arrived in Iraq. General David Petraeus deployed these in an around Bagdad to secure the city once and for all. This freed up forces to choke off the rat-lines leading east from Iran and west from Syria, starving further al-Qaida and various Shia terrorist groups.

By the beginning of 2008 one major Shia force remained, this was the Madhi militia of Muqtada al-Sadr. Al-Sadr was Iran's proxy and a direct challenger to the government. That March, Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki resolved on his own to confront al Sadr head on. Thus was born Operation Charge of Knights. The final battle for Iraq was a Shia civil war between the Shia government and al Sadr's militia...

Muqtada al Sadr