312 e lusive v ictories
campaign’s successful legal challenge to the 2000 Florida recount
process, to co-chair the commission with former Democratic Repre-
sentative Lee Hamilton. Th e Iraq Study Group (ISG) would review
the state of the war and issue its recommendation shortly after the
2006 elections.
Bush’s Lincoln Moment
Events both on the battlefi eld and at home in 2006 fi nally forced Bush
to permit a long-overdue reassessment of Iraq policy and ultimately
drove him to shift course. In Iraq the violence took a turn for the worse;
in Washington pressure mounted to reconsider a situation that even
backers of the war agreed was slipping out of control. Th e president
received a stinging rebuke in the midterm elections that cost his party
control of both houses of Congress. Soon afterward, the bipartisan Iraq
Study Group issued its report, which in eff ect acknowledged the failure
of the American war eff ort. Bush dug in his heels, however. Against the
advice of both the ISG and the Joint Chiefs, he embraced a proposal to
increase temporarily the number of American troops in Iraq to tamp
down the violence. Th e decision marked his single hands-on inter-
vention in the direction of the confl ict.
A terrorist bomb attack on February 22, 2006, that destroyed the
Askariya Mosque in Samarra, one of the holiest Shiite shrines, led to
reprisal attacks on Sunni mosques in Baghdad and triggered an esca-
lation in sectarian confl ict across Iraq. In the months that followed,
attacks reached an all-time high, surpassing 3,000 per week. Each
morning in Baghdad bodies turned up by the dozens, victims of mili-
tias, gangs, or—worse from the American perspective—government
security forces. American offi cials reported that the killers had been
“dressed in police uniforms,” but Sunni neighborhoods knew better:
the killers were the police. Mixed Sunni-Shia neighborhoods experi-
enced a process that resembled the Balkan “ethnic cleansing” of the
previous decade. Meanwhile, the Iraqi government under Prime
Minister Maliki refused to move against Shiite militias, ignoring
American calls for even-handedness. Hope for political reconciliation
evaporated. U.S. troops, often assaulted by both sides, suffered
mounting casualties.