I’ve been looking for an excuse to write about a particularly intriguing aspect of The Gamble, and I think Matthew Yglesias just gave me my hook. He’s riffing off something Benjamin Friedman wrote about Afghanistan — "There is another counterinsurgency strategy out there, which is to allow the insurgency local power, to appease it as part of a bargain…" — and comments:

But the more I think about it, the more the real strategic genius of “the surge” looks like an extremely clever way to basically rebrand a dramatic de-escalation of U.S. war aims as “victory.”

It goes further than that. The Gamble documents the forthrightness of how the Petraeus brain trust in Baghdad went about bringing the ends and the means of the war into closer balance. Tom Ricks reveals a strategy memo written in spring 2007 by Maj. Gen. David Fastabend, one of Petraeus’ top advisers and now chief of strategy for the Joint Staff, that explicitly urged the commander to cut deals with elements of the insurgency — the foundation of the effort to split the ‘reconcilables’ from the ‘irreconcilables.’ This came at a time when George W. Bush was still talking about good and evil in Iraq. What Fastabend advised — and what Petraeus did — was more than rebranding. It was redefining who the U.S.’s enemies actually were in Iraq. Whether Bush understood the significance of what Petraeus did by embracing large amounts of the Sunni insurgency is unclear, but it’s fair to say that the commander in chief acquiesced to a change in war policy dreamed up by the staff of his Iraq commander. If John Kerry had proposed exactly what Fastabend proposed — and Petraeus acted upon — Bush would have called Kerry a rank appeaser. 

Now, it’s entirely possible that it won’t ultimately work. Or, to put it more precisely, that the Sunni insurgency stopped shooting at the U.S. in order to buy time and breathing room to start shooting at the Shiites. Every other day, it seems, I get press releases from MNF-I about successful integration of the Sons of Iraq ex-insurgents into government and other straight-and-narrow employment jobs. It’s possible that this is genuine integration — that is, a path out of a violent life into a peaceful one. But it’s also possible that this is infiltration — a path from open war into stealth war. In that case, the strategy can be fairly said to have insufficiently distinguished between insurgents who were reconcilable-to-the-U.S. and insurgents who were reconcilable-to-the-Shiite-dominated-government; or that it insufficiently provided incentives to get members of the first group to join the second.

But until then, maybe a paradox of the surge — and of counterinsurgency theory — is that it represented a prospect for what you might call Armed Appeasement.