On MSNBC, Zuckerman claimed that "the consensus is that the surge is working"

On the August 21 edition of MSNBC's Tucker, U.S. News & World Report Editor-in-Chief Mortimer B. Zuckerman, asserted: "[T]he fact is that, by far, the consensus is that the surge is working. So, I don't think she [Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY)] can just deny that." Zuckerman was responding to host Tucker Carlson's question, "Why would [Clinton] announce ... that the surge is working?" -- a mischaracterization of Clinton's August 20 speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, during which she said, "We've begun to change tactics in Iraq, and in some areas, particularly in Al Anbar Province, it's working. We're just years too late changing our tactics. We can't ever let that happen again." But Zuckerman did not offer any evidence to support his claim that "the consensus is that the surge is working." In fact, members of Congress, administration officials, and experts have all stated that political reconciliation, which the Bush administration identified as a key to the success of its escalation strategy, has not occurred. Seven servicemen deployed in Iraq wrote an August 19 op-ed in The New York Times challenging even reports of military progress. Additionally, a study released by the Center for American Progress and Foreign Policy magazine found that only 17 percent of conservative, moderate, and liberal foreign policy experts surveyed between May 23 and July 4 believed the troop increase has had a positive impact on "protecting the American people from global terrorist networks and in advancing U.S. national security goals." Moreover, 64 percent of conservative experts said "the surge is having either a negative impact or no impact at all."

As Media Matters for America noted, in their August 19 Times op-ed, seven U.S. Army infantrymen and noncommissioned officers currently serving in Iraq wrote that "[t]he claim that we are increasingly in control of the battlefields in Iraq is an assessment arrived at through a flawed, American-centered framework. Yes, we are militarily superior, but our successes are offset by failures elsewhere." Later, they wrote: "Given the situation, it is important not to assess security from an American-centered perspective. The ability of, say, American observers to safely walk down the streets of formerly violent towns is not a resounding indicator of security. What matters is the experience of the local citizenry and the future of our counterinsurgency. When we take this view, we see that a vast majority of Iraqis feel increasingly insecure and view us as an occupation force that has failed to produce normalcy after four years and is increasingly unlikely to do so as we continue to arm each warring side."

CAP and Foreign Policy, which is published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, found in their third "Terrorism Index" survey that more than 80 percent of the experts surveyed -- including 64 percent of self-identified conservatives -- believed that the U.S. troop increase in Iraq has had a negative impact or no impact on national security. Participants in the survey were asked what impact, if any, "[a]dding more troops to Iraq in President Bush's recent 'surge' " has had on "protecting the American people from global terrorist networks and in advancing U.S. national security goals." Fifty-three percent of the experts surveyed said the troop increase has had a somewhat or very negative impact and 30 percent said it has had no impact at all, while 17 percent said it has had a somewhat or very positive impact. According to the survey's methodology, the survey was "designed by the Center for American Progress and Foreign Policy" and "[p]articipants in the survey were selected by Foreign Policy and the Center for American Progress for their expertise in terrorism and U.S. national security."

Additionally, in an August 6 report, national security expert Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, asserted that many of the successes in Iraq "ha[ve] not" been a result of Bush's strategy and that it "has failed in many aspects of its original plan."

Further, several experts have offered negative assessments of political progress in Iraq, and therefore of the success of the troop escalation by the Bush administration's own terms. As Media Matters has noted, when announcing his Iraq escalation strategy in January, Bush specifically stated that "[a] successful strategy for Iraq goes beyond military operations" and will include a political component: "hold[ing] the Iraqi government to the benchmarks [America] has announced." And in an appearance on the August 5 broadcast of NBC's Meet the Press, Defense Secretary Robert Gates stated that a "successful outcome in Iraq requires political reconciliation" distinct from military success:

RUSSERT: In March, you said we would know by the summer whether or not the surge was successful. Do you -- have you reached a conclusion?

GATES: I think that the military side of the surge -- we've still got a little ways to go -- but I think that the military side of the surge has been successful. I think that the ability to go in -- the problem when we would go after Al Qaeda and insurgents before is that when we would hit them in one place, they'd squirt to another place.

For the first time, the commander has enough forces that he can attack all of their basic locations at the same time. So it's much more difficult for them to squirt out and escape. And we're capturing and killing quite a lot of these people and beginning to re-establish order in neighborhoods. There's one major town -- I'm not going to name it, because I don't want it to be a target -- but there's one major town in Anbar that has not had an IED explosion since February. So, there has been progress, I think, on the military side of the surge.

RUSSERT: But they're -- a victory in Iraq is not a military solution.

GATES: No, all the commanders and I think everyone agrees that a successful outcome in Iraq requires political reconciliation, there's no question about that.

Examples of experts stating that there has not been political reconciliation in Iraq include:

• Introducing their Iraq policy paper "Strategic Reset," CAP national security experts Brian Katulis and Lawrence J. Korb argued that "[t]he fundamental premise of Bush's surge strategy -- that Iraq's leaders will make key decisions to advance their country's political transition and national reconciliation -- is at best misguided and clearly unworkable."

• In a May 17 interview with Harper's magazine, Marc Lynch, associate professor in the Department of Political Science at George Washington University, said the "surge" is "changing the distribution of violence a bit but not making much difference in the core strategic issues." He added that the Bush administration's "argument was that the surge would create a secure political space that would allow for political reconciliation. So far, the opposite has happened; there's been little progress towards reaching a new political compromise and if anything the distance between the sides seems to be growing. On the military side, there have been some interesting developments in Anbar province, like you've been reading about in the press lately, but that has little to do with the 'surge.' "

• In a July 8 Boston Globe op-ed, Robert Malley, Middle East program director for the International Crisis Group, and Peter Harling, a Damascus-based senior analyst for the organization, wrote that "the answer to Iraq's horrific violence cannot be an illusory military surge that aims to bolster the existing political structure and treats the dominant political parties as partners."

• In July 17 testimony to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Steven N. Simon, Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, asserted that "[t]he large presence of US ground forces has had little effect on Iraqi politics, or on the insurgency. The surge has redistributed insurgent activity but not suppressed it. Ironically, violence now touches more of the country than before, with a corresponding erosion of societal stability and government credibility."

• In a feature in the August 16 edition of The New York Review of Books, Peter W. Galbraith, a former U.S. ambassador to Croatia and currently senior diplomatic fellow at the Center for Arms Control, argued:

Even if the surge has had some modest military success, it has failed to accomplish its political objectives. The idea behind Bush's new strategy was to increase temporarily the number of US troops in Baghdad and Anbar. The aim was to provide a breathing space so that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government might enact a program of national reconciliation that would accommodate enough Sunnis to isolate the insurgents. Meanwhile, Iraqi forces, improved by their close relations with US troops and additional training, would take over security.

Furthermore, as Salon.com's Tim Grieve wrote on August 21, military success is, in fact, distinct from success for the overall "surge" strategy:

We'll admit it's a fine distinction, but it shouldn't be so hard to understand. Is the "surge" having some success, in some areas, in reducing the levels of violence in Iraq? Yes. Is the overall "strategy" working -- that is, is the Iraqi government using the "breathing space" it's getting to do the things it needs to do? No. While it's certainly in the Bush administration's interests to conflate the questions and confuse the answers, the White House has people on staff paid to do just that. Journalists aren't supposed to be doing it for them.

Members of Congress and the Bush administration have also pointed to a lack of political reconciliation. For example:

• In an August 20 joint statement after their recent visit to Iraq, Sens. Carl Levin (D-MI) and John Warner (R-VA) said:

  While we believe that the "surge" is having measurable results, and has provided a degree of "breathing space" for Iraqi politicians to make the political compromises which are essential for a political solution in Iraq, we are not optimistic about the prospects for those compromises. We were in Iraq both during the recent initial meeting of the Iraq Presidency Council, the Prime Minister and the President of the Kurdish region and during the immediately following expanded meeting, which were intended to reach political compromises. We would like to be optimistic that those meetings will lead to substantive progress, however -- given the performance of the Iraqi political leadership to date -- we remain extremely cautious in our expectations, as does our distinguished U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, Ambassador Ryan Crocker.

  According to Grieve, during an August 20 follow-up conference call with reporters, Levin said, "The purpose of the surge, by its own terms, was to ... give the opportunity to the Iraqi leaders to reach some political settlements. They have failed to do that. They have totally and utterly failed."

• On August 21, prior to Zuckerman's appearance on Tucker, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker said reconciliation is not occurring. As an August 21 McClatchy Newspapers article reported:

The top U.S. diplomat in Iraq on Tuesday called the country's political progress "extremely disappointing" and warned that support for the government of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki is not unlimited.

Ambassador Ryan Crocker's remarks to reporters were the harshest criticism yet by a Bush administration official of Maliki's government and may be a prelude to what he'll tell Congress in a report that he and Army Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. military commander in Iraq, will give next month.

"The progress on the national level issues has been extremely disappointing and frustrating to all concerned -- to us, to Iraqis, to the Iraqi leadership itself," Crocker said.

"We do expect results, as do the Iraqi people, and our support is not a blank check."

[...]

Crocker acknowledged Tuesday that the decision by some Sunni tribes in Anbar to align themselves with the United States against al Qaida in Iraq wasn't a sign of reconciliation between Iraq's Sunni minority and the Shiite-led government.

"It is probably an essential prerequisite for reconciliation," he said. "But it isn't reconciliation."

From the August 21 edition of MSNBC's Tucker:

CARLSON: Has Hillary Clinton taken yet another position on Iraq? Well, listen to what she told the Veterans of Foreign Wars yesterday about the troop surge.

CLINTON [video clip]: We've begun to change tactics in Iraq, and in some areas, particularly in Al Anbar Province, its working. We're just years too late changing our tactics. We can't ever let that happen again. We can't be fighting the last war. We have to be preparing to fight the new war.

CARLSON: Those comments come after the New York senator again refused to apologize for voting for the Iraq war in the first place, though she did concede that, quote, "I regret giving George Bush the authority that he misused and abused." What are voters to make of where she stands now?

Joining us: Mort Zuckerman, editor-in-chief of U.S. News & World Report and chairman and publisher of the New York Daily News, and Rosa Brooks, columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Welcome to you both.

Rosa, how can you believe, how can you -- it's almost a Zen question. How can you fit into your head these two propositions: "The surge is working"; "We ought to leave immediately"? How does that work?

[...]

CARLSON: Well, I wonder, Mort, what you think the political calculation behind admitting it in the first place is. I mean, Hillary Clinton -- you know, anybody running for president doesn't make a statement like that without a reason for making it, a political reason for making it.

Why would she announce to the Veterans of Foreign Wars yesterday that the surge is working?

ZUCKERMAN: Well, I think the fact is that, by far, the consensus is that the surge is working. So, I don't think she can just deny that.