# Iraq Surge The **Iraq Surge** was the 2007 escalation in which [[George W. Bush]], rather than withdrawing from a collapsing occupation, sent five additional Army brigades and supporting units to Iraq under a new commander, [[David Petraeus]], and a new counterinsurgency doctrine. It is the [[Iraq War]]'s most argued-over chapter, and the template invoked in every later "escalate or leave" debate — including the 2009 Afghanistan surge. ## What happened | Date | Event | |---|---| | Aug–Sept 2006 | Sunni tribes in Ramadi, led by Sheikh Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, begin organizing against al-Qaeda in Iraq — the [[Anbar Awakening]] | | December 2006 | Army/Marine Corps Field Manual 3-24, *Counterinsurgency*, is released; its development was overseen by Petraeus at the Army's Combined Arms Center | | January 10, 2007 | Bush announces "The New Way Forward" in a prime-time address: more than 20,000 additional troops, five brigades, most of them to Baghdad | | February 2007 | Petraeus replaces Gen. George Casey as commander of Multi-National Force–Iraq | | August 29, 2007 | Muqtada al-Sadr orders his Mahdi Army militia to stand down | | July 2008 | The last surge brigade leaves Iraq | With support units the increase came to roughly 30,000: U.S. troop levels rose from about 130,000 in January 2007 to a peak reported at 160,000–170,000, then fell to just under 147,000 when the surge ended. ## The doctrine FM 3-24 shifted the mission from raiding out of large bases to protecting the population: troops moved into joint security stations inside Baghdad neighborhoods, the logic being that civilians who felt safe would stop sheltering insurgents. Petraeus became its public face; the manual's principal author was the Army War College historian Conrad Crane. ## Did it work? Violence fell sharply in the second half of 2007. U.S. military deaths dropped from 126 in May to 23 in December, and Iraqi civilian deaths from more than 1,700 in May to roughly 500 in December, by one widely cited tally. How much the troops themselves caused is the core dispute. At least three other causes ran in parallel: - **The Awakening predated the surge.** The Anbar tribes turned on al-Qaeda in Iraq in 2006, months before the first new brigade arrived; the surge scaled up and paid for what they had started. - **Sadr's ceasefire** removed the largest Shia militia from the fight in August 2007. - **Sectarian sorting.** By 2007 much of Baghdad had already been ethnically cleansed into single-sect neighborhoods, leaving fewer mixed areas to fight over. The surge's stated purpose was political: to buy "breathing space" for national reconciliation. That did not come. By September 2007 Iraq had met only three of eighteen benchmarks set by Congress. Defenders call the surge the strategy that salvaged the war. Critics argue it suppressed rather than resolved the sectarian civil war the occupation had ignited, and that Sunni grievances re-emerged as [[Islamic State]] after U.S. forces left. The same split runs through [[Sunni vs. Shia]]. ## People [[Brett McGurk]], then on the National Security Council staff, was an early advocate for the surge inside the White House and later, with Ambassador Ryan Crocker, negotiated the 2008 security agreement that set the terms for U.S. withdrawal. The intellectual case was made outside government too, notably at the [[American Enterprise Institute]]. ## See Also - [[Iraq War]] · [[Iraq]] · [[Iraqi History Hub]] · [[Anbar Awakening]] - [[David Petraeus]] · [[George W. Bush]] · [[Brett McGurk]] · [[Donald Rumsfeld]] - [[Al-Qaeda]] · [[Islamic State]] · [[Sunni vs. Shia]] · [[Forever Wars]]