What a Surge Really Means

All kinds of military experts, both active duty and retired, have been calling for more troops since before the war began — former Army chief Eric Shinseki, former Centcom boss Anthony Zinni and, perhaps loudest of all, Senator John McCain. But seen in another light, the surge is the latest salvo in the 30-year tong war between the two big foreign policy factions in the Republican Party: the internationalists and the neoconservatives. The surge belongs to the neocons and in particular to Frederick Kagan, who taught military history at West Point for a decade and today works out of the American Enterprise Institute as a military analyst. Kagan argued for a surge last fall in the pages of the Weekly Standard, the neocons' house organ, after the military's previous surge, Operation Forward Together, failed in late October. Kagan turned to former Army Vice Chief of Staff Jack Keane, a retired four-star general who still has street cred at the Pentagon, to help flesh out the plan and then sell it to the White House. The neocons don't have the same juice they had at the start of the war, in part because so many of them have fled the government in shame. But they are a long way from dead.

It was no accident that the surge idea began gathering steam among the war's most ardent supporters at exactly the same moment the Baker-Hamilton group proposed, in early December, that the White House start executing a slow but steady withdrawal from Iraq. To the neocons, former Secretary of State James Baker is the archenemy, the epitome of those internationalists who have always been too willing to cut deals with shady players overseas. His commission's 79 recommendations struck the neocons as defeatist — and a condemnation of a war they had thought up in the first place. And so, re-energized by the return of Baker to prominence, they went on the offensive. "We were hearing all this talk of pulling back and pulling out and how not to lose," said a retired senior officer. "But we're looking for a way to win."

Although the Baker group allowed for a surge to stabilize Baghdad or speed up training of Iraqis, it conditioned that O.K. with the phrase "if the U.S. commander in Iraq determines that such steps would be effective." When it became clear to the internationalists that the Kagan-Keane surge was winning White House attention without any calls for more troops from generals on the ground, they counter-counterattacked. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, a former four-star, said a surge had been tried in Baghdad — and had failed last fall — and would only further delay Iraqis in taking control of their own security. Powell added, a little pointedly, that he had not heard any generals ask for more troops — an oblique way of hinting that the President was saying one thing about who was deciding troop levels but doing another.