9-21-08, 9:10 am

The surge of 30,00 US troops from January 2007 to June 2007 caused the decline in violence in Iraq. At least that's the commonly-held wisdom. John McCain thought the surge was so successful, he even went so far as to suggest that the surge in troops was his idea.

In making this claim, however, McCain fudged the timeline on when the surge began. He claimed that the so-called 'awakening councils,' the US military-funded militia groups in western Iraq who took pay and weapons in exchange for dropping their opposition to the occupation, came into existence as part of the surge in January of 2007. Actually, the 'awakening councils' were an ad hoc exercise put together months prior to the surge.

During an interview with CBS, which the network inexplicably scrubbed from the aired program and subsequently admitted to doing so, McCain said, the surge 'began the Anbar awakening. I mean, that's just a matter of history.'

McCain's confusion about the actual history of the awakening councils was so egregious, it prompted Ilan Goldenburg, policy director of the National Security Network, to question McCain's qualifications for president. He said, 'It is so appalling and so factually wrong that I'm actually sitting here wondering who McCain's advisers are. This isn't some gaffe where he talks about the Iraq-Pakistan border. It's a real misunderstanding of what has happened in Iraq over the past year.'

If the surge of troops in in 2007 had no impact on the changing security situation in western Iraq, what about in Baghdad itself, the location of at least a quarter of Iraq's population?

At the time the surge took place, some reports by human rights organizations, which Political Affairs reported on, indicated that forced population movements, commonly described as ethnic cleansing, played a large role in the gradual reduction of violence through 2007.

In other words, international aid organizations suspected that inter-ethnic conflict was reduced only after huge numbers of Sunnis in Baghdad were forced to leave their homes and businesses.

Media reports this week appear to confirm these reports. An article by Reuters reported that satellite images 'show heavily Sunni Arab neighborhoods of Baghdad began emptying before a US troop surge in 2007, graphic evidence of ethnic cleansing that preceded a drop in violence.'

The Reuters story quoted John Agnew, a UCLA geographer who studied the satellite photos, as saying, 'By the launch of the surge, many of the targets of conflict had either been killed or fled the country, and they turned off the lights when they left.'

He added, 'Essentially, our interpretation is that violence has declined in Baghdad because of intercommunal violence that reached a climax as the surge was beginning.'

Writing in the peer-reviewed journal Environment and Planning A, Agnew and his team of researchers argued, 'Our findings suggest that the surge has had no observable effect, except insofar as it has helped to provide a seal of approval for a process of ethno-sectarian neighborhood homogenization that is now largely achieved.'

Similar satellite imagery techniques have been used to give evidence for ethnic cleansing in other international situations, reported Reuters.

To date, international aid organizations estimate that as many as 4 million Iraqis, or about 15 percent of the population, have been displaced since the launch of the war in 2003, and are living as refugees in neighboring countries or in other parts of Iraq.

--Reach Joel Wendland at