Jim Henley of Unqualified Offerings notes the following about the surge:

The pretended meaning is, The US increased troop strength in Iraq for a period of time beginning in 2007. The actual meaning is, the US increased troop strength WHILE ramping up a program to pay off Sunni resistance leaders WHILE Iraq’s warring ethno-religious factions finished completely remaking Iraq’s demographic patterns, owing to tens-to-hundreds of thousands of dead and millions of exiled and internally displaced, WHILE the US turned the capital into a warren of barricades. The net result of all those changes has been a less obtrusively violent Iraq for the time being, and the whole arrangement is ‘The Surge’ in practice, but the cheerleaders talk as if it was all due to The Surge in pretense. Meanwhile Iraq’s ‘calm’ would count as calamity almost anywhere on earth but Darfur or Zimbabwe.

Very well said, young man.