Pushing Back

Marc Lynch over at Foreign Policy pushes back against the growing CW (evidenced by Beinart's column below) that Bush's greatest accomplishment was the surge. Lynch says that's debatable - but setting that aside for the moment - he'd argue that the Status of Forces Agreement was Bush's greatest moment.

Peter Beinart today bravely repeats the emerging would-be conventional wisdom. Rather than simply denounce everything Republican, he argues, Democrats should admit that the "surge" worked and -- uniquely echoing a thousand recent op-eds -- was President Bush's finest moment. I have a hard time imagining anything as tedious as rehashing those tired debates from the campaign about the "surge" -- perhaps we could have another round of arguments as to whether the surge brigades arriving in the spring of 2007 caused the Sunni turn against al-Qaeda in the fall of 2006? But in the interests of post-partisanship, I am willing to offer an alternative as Bush's finest hour in Iraq: the Status of Forces Agreement.

Signing a Status of Forces Agreement requiring the full withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Iraq on a fixed three year timeline demonstrated a real flexibility on Bush's part. It demonstrated a pragmatism and willingness to put the national interest ahead of partisanship that few of us believed he possessed. It is largely thanks to Bush's acceptance of his own bargaining failure that Barack Obama will inherit a plausible route to successful disengagement from Iraq.

Read the whole post.