The Surge Didn’t Work

Here’s Barack Obama confirming the prevailing opinion that the 2007 Iraq troop surge was successful.  “The surge worked” was a popular slogan that was parroted by mainstream pundits and politicians, despite the fact that the stated goal of the surge, to reconcile the competing factions through a democratic parliamentary system, was never met.  Instead, the surge of U.S. troops helped the Shi’a that America had put in power ethnically cleanse the capital city of their Sunni opposition and completely isolate them from the power center in Baghdad. Obama would use the supposed success of the Iraq surge to justify a surge of his own in Afghanistan once President, a policy that proved to be equally if not more disastrous than the Iraq surge.