The McCain Surge
In the summer of 2003, after returning from Iraq to assess the military conditions on the ground there, John McCain began making the case that the US must move quickly to smother the insurgency before it gathered steam. He warned about the erosion of security and called for a much greater commitment to win the war by increasing U.S. troop strength to carry out an effective counterinsurgency strategy. He argued for far more ground troops to "conduct offensive operations" and give us "the necessary manpower to conduct a focused counterinsurgency campaign across the Sunni Triangle that seals off enemy operating areas, conducts search and destroy missions, and holds territory."
Over the next few years, John McCain continued to push (see here for a chronology of McCain statements) for a larger ground force in Iraq and for a new counterinsurgency campaign to rout the enemy and achieve success.
Finally, on January 10, 2007, President Bush announced that a "surge" of five brigades would begin flowing into Iraq. Since mid-June, with all five brigades finally in place, Gen. Petraeus has been fully implementing his new counterinsurgency plan to take the war to the enemy, deny him territory, and increase security in and around Baghdad and the Anbar province. So far, the results have been encouraging, as Brookings Institution scholars Michael O'Hanlon and Robert Pollack wrote (add link) in the July 30 New York Times, "Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq." This type of news may explain the comment House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) made to the Washington Post also on July 30:
"We, by and large, would be wise to wait on the [Petraeus] report." Many Democrats have anticipated that, at best, Petraeus and U.S. ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker would present a mixed analysis of the success of the current troop surge strategy, given continued violence in Baghdad. But of late there have been signs that the commander of U.S. forces might be preparing something more generally positive. Clyburn said that would be "a real big problem for us."
For many years John McCain urged a larger ground force to implement a new counterinsurgency campaign like the one now underway in Iraq, as Michael Hirsh noted in the July 26 Newsweek: "As we now know nearly four years later, McCain was dead on in his analysis of what went wrong in Iraq ... McCain was so right that, among military experts today, the emerging conventional wisdom about Bush's current 'surge' is that if it had occurred back then - when McCain wanted it and the political will existed in this country to support it for the necessary number of years - it might well have succeeded."
Today, our new counterinsurgency campaign is showing signs of success, and John McCain believes we can still prevail in Iraq if Washington politicians exercise resolve not panic.