To repeat something mentioned below, John McCain told Katie Couric that the surge caused the Anbar Awakening:

Colonel McFarland was contacted by one of the major Sunni sheiks. Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening. I mean, that’s just a matter of history.

And yet here’s an article McFarland co-wrote which makes it clear that not only did the events he was involved with predate the surge, but he was out of Anbar by February 2007 — just as the first surge forces were arriving. The term “surge” doesn’t so much as appear in his account. Seth Colter Walls notes that McCain himself understood the chronology correctly at one point.

Meanwhile, as Keith Olbermann apparently noted in tonight’s broadcast, CBS (part of the vast media conspiracy that McCain believes is arrayed against him) handled McCain’s blunder by using misleading editing to cover it up: “CBS curiously, to say the least, left it on the edit room floor. It aired Katie Couric’s question, but in response, it aired part of McCain’s answer to the other question instead.” Sometimes things have to end up on the cutting room floor in television, but it seems to me that if you show video of a question being asked, you ought to cut to the interviewee answering that question not just show some other film. Certainly when you’ve got a candidate who’s made the idea that he’s super-knowledgeable about national security policy misstating the basic facts of the issue that seems noteworthy.

Here’s John McCain talking to Katie Couric and explaining — but with his facts all wrong — why the Anbar Awakening counts as a consequence of the surge:

Colonel McFarland was contacted by one of the major Sunni sheiks. Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening. I mean, that’s just a matter of history. Thanks to General Petraeus, our leadership, and the sacrifice of brave young Americans. I mean, to deny that their sacrifice didn’t make possible the success of the surge in Iraq, I think, does a great disservice to young men and women who are serving and have sacrificed.

Spencer Ackerman asks the press corps to recognize that “this is completely fucking wrong” and points to then-Colonel, now-General Sean MacFarland explaining the origins of the awakening to UPI’s Pam Hess on September 29, 2006. That was a bit over a month before the midterm elections. The surge wasn’t announced until after the elections and wasn’t actually implemented until long after MacFarland gave the interview. And presumably the events he was describing happened before the interview itself.

This specific timing issue aside, we can see here the larger point that McCain doesn’t actually seem to know what the surge was. But the surge troops were overwhelmingly sent to increase the level of manpower in Baghdad (i.e., not where the Anbar Awakening happened) and almost certainly (along with a tactical shift to more of a population protection mission) deserves credit for reducing the bloodshed in Baghdad by stabilizing the borders between now-segregated neighborhoods. I’m not sure I would go so far as to say that it had nothing to do what happened in Anbar, but it wasn’t a major factor, and certainly didn’t make anything happen in September 2006. I note that this isn’t the first time the right has had occasion to appeal to Michael Dummett’s theory of backward causation in their discussion of Iraq.

After a couple of days worth of chaotic retreat, the right wing seems to have settled on a fallback position, namely that it’s only possible to now contemplate withdrawing from Iraq because things have gotten so much better and all improvements in conditions — including things that happened before the surge began — are due to the surge. Thus, despite Obama apparently having shown good judgment on the question of invading Iraq and seeming to have the best policy moving forward, “really” McCain is vindicated.

In addition to the somewhat magical thinking in which things like the “awakening,” the Sadrist cease fire, and the natural reduction in violence that comes with a completed process of ethnic cleansing become consequences of the surge, this misses the larger point of the surge debate. Surge opponents said the surge was pointless — a tactical smokescreen to obscure the fact that hawks have an unworkable strategy. And now, over 18 months after the 2006 midterms showed that the voters want an end to this war, the hawks still can’t explain what’s been accomplished in exchange for the hundreds of dead and hundreds of billions spent over what, say, following the Baker-Hamilton recommendations would have cost us. The basic shape of the Middle East is the same, our posture in Iraq is still unsustainable, we’re still getting nowhere with Iran, and things are worse than ever in Afghanistan. Probably, but not certainly, the surge has helped save some Iraqi lives. But fundamentally, we’re still going to have to leave Iraq and it’s still the case — just as it was before the war — that Iraq might muddle along okay or might turn into a disaster all depending on what choices Iraqi leaders make.

Good piece by Matt Duss. I especially like the last bit:

Perhaps most importantly, no real consensus yet exists among Iraqis as to what the new Iraq will be. Consensus does exist, however, around the belief that no genuine, sustainable Iraqi unity can develop while the Iraqi government continues to be underwritten by a foreign military presence. Recognising the latter consensus is essential for enabling Iraqis to arrive at the former.

This is important. To say that we can’t leave Iraq until we succeed, or else that we can only now contemplate leaving Iraq because we’ve succeeded (because “the surge worked” or what have you) is to miss the point. The underlying problem in Iraq has long been the lack of any kind of consensus over what a legitimate Iraqi state would look like. But one point on which there is something resembling consensus is that a legitimate Iraqi state can’t be permanently in a state of American military occupation.

Jason Zengerle gets even-handed:

There’s no denying that liberals who once derided Maliki as a Bush administration stooge are now touting him as the authentic and sovereign voice of the Iraqi people; but conservatives are doing their own flip-flop as well.

I think that’s wrong in a whole bunch of ways. For one thing, it’s not some kind of crazy inconsistency to deride someone as a stooge while he’s being a stooge, and then to stop deriding him when he stops being a stooge. I don’t think anyone can deny that over the past couple of months Maliki has moved to a position more independent from the Bush administration. Meanwhile, nobody’s “touting” Maliki as the “sovereign voice of the Iraqi people” but he is in fact the Prime Minister of the sovereign government of Iraq just as Hu Jintao is President of China whether or not he’s also the voice of the people. Last, the one thing everyone, right and left, agrees on about this is that Maliki is taking this position in part for political purposes. In other words, his position (and Obama’s) is popular among the Iraqi people.

Maliki is still Maliki — a fairly weak leader trying to hold onto power by hook or by crook. The significance of his government’s pro-timetable position has nothing to do with turning him into some kind of folk hero.

Dan Balz reviews Obama’s trip to Iraq: “But the curious turn of events made for an unexpected opening act for the Democrat’s week-long tour of seven countries, demonstrating anew the combination of agility and good fortune that has marked his campaign.”

There’s no denying that good fortune played a role here, but one does need to consider the possibility that Obama got “lucky” here because he and his team, unlike John McCain and his team, aren’t driven by hubris and neo-imperial fantasies. Maliki doesn’t like the McCain plan for open-ended occupation because it’s not politically tenable in Iraq. And one reason Obama and other progressives have long opposed open-ended occupation is precisely because we realized that it’s not politically tenable in Iraq. Obama got “lucky” with the timing (or, rather, Maliki seems to have decided to help him out) but in an important sense what carried the day here was that Obama’s policy is sensitive to realities in Iraq in a way that McCain’s isn’t.

I think the “news analysis” features in the newspapers are a little bit per se absurd (it’s not an opinion! we swear! it’s analysis!) but Richard Oppel and Jeff Zeleny on Obama’s trip and the events in Iraq seems about spot-on to me. Still, I’m not sure even Oppel & Zeleny quite grasp the scope of McCain’s debacle here. He’d spent, several weeks with the main theme of his campaign being, quite literally, to criticize Barack Obama for not having been physically present in Iraq recently. This (of course) got Obama to go to Iraq, thus setting up a dilemma. Either Obama would survey the “progress” in Iraq and change his position, thus making him a flip-flopper, or else he would refuse to change his position, thus making him obstinate and out of touch with reality.

But instead of either of those things happening, Obama went to Iraq and Iraqi leaders said he’d been right all along! That’s about as close to “game, set, match” as you get in terms of real world events influencing your political campaign. What’s more, given the domestic situation and John McCain’s inability to talk about domestic issues persuasively, he can’t afford to play for a draw on Iraq.

War criminal Radovan Karadzic was arrested in Serbia bringing to an end the long twilight of his career as a fugitive from international justice. Here’s a useful PBS profile of Karadzic. The Finding Karadzic blog is interesting (and though soon to be literally obsolete will presumably feature trial coverage in the future). And then there’s Russ Baker’s 2004 article on how Karadzic was being allowed to evade justice.

A great day for humanity and international law, and a bad day for massacres and war crimes.

UPDATE: Heather Hurlburt smartly puts this turn of events in the context of last week’s ICC indictment of Omar Bashir to observe that “for an institution that has been ridiculed, assaulted and accused of non-existence in recent years, international law — and more important, international accountability for crimes committed against one’s own citizens — is having a pretty darn good run right now.” She also makes the provocative point that the United States is looking a bit like the dispensable nation right now with these events haven “taken place pretty much without the United States or even, in the case of the ICC, against the will of our government.” Just think what could be done if by far the richest, largest, and most important liberal state were to return to involves ourselves constructively in these international processes.