The suicide bombing stopped because Israel massively cracked down on the terrorists in the West Bank, employed rigorous screening at border checkpoints (for which it was taken to task by such worthies as Condoleeza Rice), and built a security fence (the kind we are told will not work on the US/Mexico border). Whatever funding Saddam Hussein was providing to the terrorist operations could readily be replaced, and probably was not needed in the first place (Saddam provided it for his own PR purposes).

I infer that you are probably a supporter of Israel. Please be aware that attempting to justify the Iraq war as something the US did for Israel’s sake is the last thing Israel needs.

“according to some observers, the surge worked to the extent it did because we paid off the Sunni tribes that turned against Al Qaeda and other foreign jihadi elements.”

From what I’ve read, the Petraeus strategy also included use of American troops in counterinsurgency operations to prevent the Sunnis who were changing sides from being slaughtered by the initially better prepared al-Qaeda forces. The Petraeus strategy was also dependent on the Sunnis being willing to be paid off. I think it was in a Bing West book where I read about a Sunni tribal leader telling American troops that if Iraq’s Sunnis came to America, they would take over. I suspect that attitude was a lot less prevalent in January 2007 as the Sunnis faced defeat in civil war. I’d like to think that a counterinsurgency strategy would have yielded similar results if it had been adopted several years earlier, but I can’t say I’m very sure of that.

I would say that great minds work the same way, but – alas – neither McCain nor myself fall in that category. ;-)

Bush’s biggest failure in deciding to invade (besides underestimating the difficulty and cost of achieving an acceptable result) was, IMHO, in failing to perceive how fragile and unstable the domestic consensus in favor of the war was, and how devastating the effect of the collapse of that consensus would be to the country’s ability to prudently advance its interests and principles abroad. And how the collapse of the pro-war consensus would be exploited by the Democrats to achieve their domestic ambitions.

So it’s easy to see why Bush’s performance evaluation plunged the more he seemed clueless about the war. And even with the surge and all that it’s not so convincing to say it was all worth it.

We shouldn’t let that failure distort what we do know when it comes to Israel, Iraq etc. But it will to some extent, and we just have to hope not to a fatal extent. The example from the movie on being spooked by uncertain intelligence on Saddam is good. In any case, “Iraq” will haunt us for a while.

That doesn’t mean that dumping Rumsfeld and switching to counterinsurgency in early 2005 would have yielded the same successes it did in 2007. We can’t know. Maybe the Sunnis weren’t ready to really deal until they had more experience with the jihadists and were face-to-face with the destruction of the Sunni enclaves in the Baghdad area. One lesson to draw is that societies are really complicated and the ability of the US to intervene decisively will often come at great cost in human resources, human lives, and time and that the end result might still be ambiguous and fragile. Maybe it might end up being easier and the outcome happier than all that, but it is very unwise to build plans on such assumptions. I think a Republican who can say all that would, along with being right, get a lot of public sympathy

Bush deserves enormous credit for the adopting the Petraeus strategy and the combination of that strategy and the Sunni Awakening really did isolate and weaken al-Qaeda, restore a measure of public order and allow Iraqi politics to evolve in a more consensual direction (at least as compared to what was happening from 2004-2006.) That is actually a lot though it is up to the Iraqis as to how much of those gains last.