Linda Robinson takes a closer look at the ’surge’ and the recent developments in Iraq in general, and concludes that both the conservative narrative about the success of the surge and the liberal narrative are wrong.

Conservatives argue that George W. Bush was able to bring peace and stability to Iraq by sending more troops. They say that his decision to do so, even though most called on him to withdraw the troops because the price for success was to great, shows that he is a determined and courageous leader.

Liberals, on the other hand, seem to believe that the situation in Iraq has improved because secterian leaders ’suddenly’ decided to put down their weapons, albeit temporarily, and work with each other for the greater good. The surge, they say, has little to nothing to do with it, nor does American involvement in Iraq’s domestic politics.

As said, both are wrong.

My answer? Bottom line, for the first time since the war began, a U.S. leader decided to address the political motivations of the Iraqi combatants. Petraeus convened a study group that shrewdly analyzed the raging sectarian conflict, then came up with what he called “the Anaconda strategy” to address the underlying dynamic.

Petraeus and his diplomatic partner, Ambassador Ryan Crocker, realized that the first disastrous steps taken by the U.S. occupation authority led by L. Paul Bremer — disbanding Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party and the old regime’s security services — had helped create the Sunni insurgency. They produced a critical mass of angry men worried that the Sunnis who had run the old Iraq would wind up on the bottom in the new one. Those fears were soon realized: Bremer’s occupation government pushed for a sequence of poorly planned elections that wound up entrenching the power of a Shiite-dominated coalition, which began a “sectarian cleansing” campaign against Iraq’s minority Sunnis — and tilted the country into a full-on civil war.

While policymakers back in Washington continued to be duped by sectarian-minded Shiite politicians, Petraeus and Crocker set about using all available levers — including thinking about Iraqi politics — to rectify the earlier, catastrophic U.S. blunders.

The extra surge brigades certainly helped, but the number of U.S. troops was far less important than the new ways in which they were used. The most important new tactical move still gets scant Beltway attention: Petraeus’s initiative to reach out to the Sunni insurgency and its base. “We cannot kill our way to victory,” he said…

Baghdad was being engulfed in growing mayhem: ever-larger car bombs, lethal copper projectiles, homemade explosives packed into sewer pipes that burned U.S. soldiers alive. But the U.S. troops persisted. Over the summer of 2007, the Sunnis responded en masse to the new approach: By September, according to U.S. officials and my own reporting, 15,000 Sunnis had signed up to become checkpoint guards and neighborhood watchmen, paid and monitored by the U.S. battalions that were being so carefully coached by Petraeus. The Shiite government was not amused; the last thing it wanted was its former Sunni foes back inside the fold. Still, by year’s end, 70,000 Sunnis — comprising the vast majority of the insurgents and their support base — had joined the new U.S.-backed effort. This policy — battled by bureaucrats both in Baghdad and inside the Beltway — changed the tide of the war.

As the Sunni insurgents switched sides, they passed vital intelligence to their U.S. partners and paymasters, which enabled Petraeus’s forces to target Sunni holdouts, including diehards affiliated with al-Qaeda in Iraq.

This begs the question why Sunnis were so willing to respond to the U.S. overture:

Because they were getting desperate and saw Petraeus’s outstretched hand as their best chance of surviving a campaign of sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing led by the Shiites and fueled by neighboring Iran. The secular Sunnis’ alliance with the jihadist insurgents had always been an uneasy marriage of convenience, and it broke up when Petraeus made a better offer.

Another major misunderstanding, the author explains, is Moqtada al-Sadr’s decision to tell his militia members to put down their weapons.

That move has been widely misinterpreted as a spontaneous, unilateral gesture; in fact, it came after months of military and political pressure. Iraqi special operations forces, backed by elite U.S. combat advisers, conducted near-nightly raids against the most extreme elements of the Mahdi Army. In March 2007, according to Petraeus’s staff, the special ops units captured Qais Khazali, a member of the radical Lebanese militia Hezbollah and a Sadrist militia leader. Khazali, U.S. military officials said, provided details of extensive Iranian assistance to Khazali’s henchmen. This information, together with two assassinations of provincial governors by Sadrist forces, rattled Maliki — and began to turn him against Sadr, a fellow Shiite who had helped put the prime minister in office.

The final straw came on Aug. 27, when Sadr’s militiamen attacked guards at the main Shiite shrine in Karbala as a million worshipers arrived in the city to mark a holy day. An apoplectic Maliki rushed to Karbala, and the resulting confrontation led Sadr (then in Iran) to back down and issue his ceasefire declaration. Maliki then launched an offensive in Basra this spring to break Sadrists’ control of the city, the port and oil pumping station. The wedge between Maliki and Sadr widened when massive arms caches of recent Iranian manufacture were discovered, despite Iran’s 2007 pledge to desist stoking Iraq’s nascent civil war.

Does the above mean that all problems have been solved? No – the U.S. needs to continue pressuring Maliki and other sectarian leaders. Without U.S. pressure, nothing would have changed, and if that pressure would suddenly disappear, most such leaders would go back to their old ways.

Reading her report – and I encourage you to read it in its entirety – makes it abundantly clear that General David Petraeus is more than ‘just’ a general; he’s a skilled diplomat, who’s able to convince people to change their (old) ways. He’s able, it seems, to encourage good behavior, and punish bad behavior. He’s friendly when he needs to be friendly, yet angry when he needs to be.

Read the report; that man is presidential material.