Few people alive know more about counterinsurgency that Dave Kilcullen, the former adviser to David Petraeus during the dawn of the surge and current adviser to Condoleezza Rice on COIN. (And the subject of a forthcoming profile by moi.) Given John McCain's current bout of surge/Awakening amnesia, it might be helpful to give a refresher of the timeline and facts behind the Awakening and the broader Sunni revolt against al-Qaeda. Helpfully, Kilcullen wrote possibly the most comprehensive history of that development currently available, for Small Wars Journal. This is from "Anatomy of a Revolt," published August 29, 2007.

The uprising began last year, far out in western Anbar province, but is now affecting about 40% of the country. It has spread to Ninewa, Diyala, Babil, Salah-ad-Din, Baghdad and – intriguingly – is filtering into Shi’a communities in the South. The Iraqi government was in on it from the start; our Iraqi intelligence colleagues predicted, well before we realized it, that Anbar was going to “flip”, with tribal leaders turning toward the government and away from extremists.

Emphasis mine. "Last year," of course, refers in this context to 2006, well before the surge began. To be fair, I think that what Kilcullen calls the "Baghdad Variant" -- the spread of the Sunni/AQI split to Baghdad, in other words -- was surely accelerated and entrenched by the Petraeus "population protection" strategy that the surge supported. But to say as McCain does that the Awakening followed the surge is to rewrite history.

And -- this is the real point -- it has consequences. Believing that the surge engendered the Awakening is to subscribe to a self-deception whereby Iraqis have no agency, no self-interest. All they are is impressed by superior force; and that in turn implies that the key to success is to provide that awful demonstration effect. Proper students of counterinsurgency understand instead that counterinsurgency is war among the people or what Kilcullen calls "armed social science work" (though the important COIN practitioner-turned-skeptic Gian Gentile disagrees) and seek to maximize the rational decisionmaking to decide siding with an insurgency is against its interests, through inducements that are (Kilcullen again) 80 percent non-military. As a result, denying such agency horrifies counterinsurgents because it leads to, among other undesirable consequences, lost wars. And lots of them. Welcome to the McCain administration.