How Much Credit Goes to the Surge?

In recent months, US casualties and Iraqi deaths have dropped markedly. Americans and Iraqis welcome the news but are perplexed by it as well. This is especially so in the US Congress, where confusion and indecision have deepened, and opposition to the war is even more tepid and incoherent than a year ago. The administration and the military have cautiously claimed progress; sympathetic figures in Congress and the media have incautiously trumpeted it. They advance a readily understood explanation with an intuitive plausibility that a war-weary public is willing to accept. But momentous shifts rarely have simple causes. cont