Photo: DoD

Photo: DoD

This week at the 6th District congressional debate in Stillwater, Michele Bachmann hailed last year’s “surge” of troops to Iraq as an unmitigated success, saying it has done “what no one thought was possible.” Iraq has peace and calm, she said. And al-Qaeda has “essentially been vanquished.”

At the vice-presidential debate in St. Louis, Sarah Palin testified repeatedly to the Good News of the surge.

Violence is down in Iraq, there is no question. Iraqis are out on the streets after dark. Some are even returning home from the neighboring countries the fled to. Not too long ago thousands of Iraqis were murdered every month; today it’s hundreds. Fewer Americans are dying. Iraq’s national soccer team is even back in Baghdad–training there for the first time since 2004.

But can we pin all of this on the surge? And will it last?

No. And maybe.

Here are five things Michele Bachmann and the “surge” evangelists aren’t telling you:

ONE: An uncertain future for the “Awakening”

A major factor in the reduction of violence was the so-called “Awakening” of Sunni tribal leaders who began publicly opposing the indiscriminate tactics of al-Qaeda in Iraq beginning in the Anbar province in 2005. Today Iraq’s many “Awakening councils” boast nearly 100,000 members–trained, armed and funded by the U.S. military to battle al-Qaeda in Iraq.

The problem? This month the U.S. military, which has been paying Awakening members $300 a month for their loyalty, begins handing control of the force over to the Shi’ite led Iraqi government, which has been tentative at best about a separate Sunni army. It’s a tense relationship and so far Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has only agreed to pay salaries to about half of the Awakening members beginning October 31. There are no clear plans for the rest–raising the prospect of a repeat of the early days of the insurgency, when the U.S. dismissed the entire Iraqi army, leaving hundreds of thousands of Iraqis unemployed, poor, armed and mad as hell.

TWO: Killings of Iraqi security forces higher than last year

A Pentagon report does indeed claim a 77 percent decline in violence in Iraq from just one year ago. However, the Associated Press recently reported that the number of Iraqi security forces killed last month hit 159–a third higher than the same period last year. And what are we to make of the suicide bombings that killed at least two-dozen Shi’ite worshipers yesterday in Baghdad?

THREE: Young Sadr isn’t going anywhere

Remember the “firebrand cleric”? The effect of Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mehdi Army on violence levels in Iraq is the stuff of legend. When his army and its affiliated (some say rogue) death squads stands down, violence drops. When the army is told to fight, it fights hard and fierce. Sadr is again calling for the U.S. to make a swift exit from the country. Where will Sadr’s allegiances and judgments fall in one month? Six months? One year?

FOUR: The death squads may have made the “peace”

There is compelling–and chilling–evidence that the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad’s neighborhoods was basically completed in the weeks before the first surge forces landed in Iraq. You need look no further than the New York Times’ recent multimedia survey of Baghdad neighborhoods to understand the extent to the neighborhood-by-neighborhood cleansing that preceded the surge.

There is also the less conventional but terribly compelling study published recently by UCLA geographers showing evidence of the cleansing of Sunni neighborhoods using satellite analysis of night light. Here’s what they found:

“Essentially, our interpretation is that violence has declined in Baghdad because of intercommunal violence that reached a climax as the surge was beginning,” lead author John Agnew, a UCLA professor of geography and authority on ethnic conflict, told Science Daily. “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.”

“If the surge had truly ‘worked,’ we would expect to see a steady increase in night-light output over time, as electrical infrastructure continued to be repaired and restored, with little discrimination across neighborhoods,” said co-author Thomas Gillespie. “Instead, we found that the night-light signature diminished in only in certain neighborhoods, and the pattern appears to be associated with ethno-sectarian violence and neighborhood ethnic cleansing.”

FIVE: Look north! Look south!

Don’t forget the north and south of Iraq. In the semi-autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq, Kurds are competing with Turkmens and Sunni Arabs for ownership of oil centers like Kirkuk. Kurdish ambitions are a constant point of tension within the Iraqi government and have paralyzed the government repeatedly. There has been an uptick in sectarian killing in the north. It’s ominous to say the least.

In the south, particularly in Amarah and the port city of Basra, the Shi’ite Dawa party–led in part by Maliki–is in constant, sometimes bloody, conflict with another powerful Shi’ite party (with a formadable militia): the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq.

There are elections on the horizon in Iraq. But here too there are great tensions and risks. Elections in Iraq have been stained by campaigns of assassination and intimidation.

The seeds of future conflict are strewn everywhere in Baghdad even as the surge comes to an end.

If the many campaign-trail boosters of the surge are worried about any of these things, they’re not showing it. And where are the politicians who opposed the surge? With November fast approaching, they may be afraid to challenge a narrative of victory that seems to have taken hold with the American mainstream. The success mantra seems to satisfy all sides for now.