Some thoughtful reader emails in response to my post below:

Obama is on shaky ground with his attempt to divorce the Anbar Awakening from the surge. “The Surge” was a manifestation of the strategies outlined by General Petraeus and his co-author, Lt. Gen. Jim Mattis, in the combined Army /Marine Corps Field Manual on Counterinsurgency. (FM 3-24, you can find a the first draft, from 2006, here.) If you search for the largely unchanged final draft, you will note that Mattis is no longer named, replaced by Gen. Amos. This is because Mattis had left the post at the Marine Corps Development Command for . . . Anbar. In Anbar, which a military report had declared as all but lost to the insurgency a few months earlier, Mattis applied the ideas he and Petraeus had developed and used them to foster the Anbar Awakening. While Obama is technically correct in separating the Anbar Awakening from “the surge,” he is only superficially correct. In reality, both the Awakening and the Surge flow from the same strategy and from the same minds, the same strategy and the same minds that Senator Neophyte forcefully rejected. For the man who is likely to become our next Commander in Chief to not know that the Awakening and the Surge are fruits from the same tree is disturbing, to say the least.

And:

I spent most of 2007 in Iraq and my observation is that the surge worked because it did coincide with a willingness of Iraqis to cooperate, but the event responsible for the Sunni awakening was Iraq in 2005-2006. The original surge in 2003 did not take because the Iraqi people did not realize what a wonderful opportunity they had been given. After the initial invasion, the apolitical 90% of the population, moderate Muslims who just want to make enough money to raise their family and then go home and have a drink at night. did not care if the 5% of radicals were fighting with the U.S. and the 5% of Iraqis who supported us. Only after every Iraqi saw firsthand the choice they had between living in a bloody thugocracy and in a country where the leaders were moderately beholden to the people did the Iraqi man on the street even care enough to call the police to report bomb makers next door.
By early to mid-2006, most Iraqis wanted to get rid of the thugs that had taken over the country, but we did not have enough troops to guarantee that calling the police about the bomb maker next door would either get him arrested or protect the citizen who reported trouble makers. That is when we should have surged, but we couldn’t at that point because it would have been seen as a crass political move because the Democrats had turned the defeat into the issue for 2006 and because Bush had used victory as a political issue in 2004. If it had not been for the campaign for congress, I bet (hope) Rumsfeld would have been fired in March and the surge begun eight months sooner. Unfortunately, Bush had to wait until after the elections so that he could be the Commander in Chief and not be accused of using the war for political gain. Cost of that delay was about 1000 US soldiers and countless Iraqis dead.