Defining the Surge rhetoric

If you follow the story of the Iraq Surge, and it's aftermath, you quickly realize that there is an official story...one dutifully endorsed by the media. A story where the increase of US forces quelled the insurgency. A similar meme exists where Obama somehow 'lost the peace'....but I digress.

Doug Ollivant of the New America Foundation penned a piece last summer regrading this 'new orthodoxy', that I somehow missed until now; but found thanks to Musings on Iraq. He lays a fair amount of blame at the feet of President Obama for institutional ambiguity on Iraq and Afghanistan, while laying out a pretty solid counter-argument to the generally accepted dogma of how the violence in Iraq decreased, somewhat.


Countering the New Orthodoxy: Reinterpreting Counterinsurgency in Iraq