Thursday, January 31, 2008

The Surge Has Not, Will Not And Has Never Worked, Period.

Does anyone remember what the surge was supposed to accomplish. One year ago when Bush proposed this insanity, he wanted to give the Iraqi government breathing room to work on the stability of their government. If you listen to him and his supporters now, they claim it worked because violence is down.

Well woo hoo, I guess killings that number in the thousands is better than people dying in the tens of thousands. Of course, sane people realize that the reason so many people are dying period is that the underlying problems are nowhere near to being fixed. If anything, the growing sectarianism that has separated people from each other based on religion has taken people out of harms way (and don't forget the millions of refugees taken out of the mix that now live in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, etc).

The Washington Independent has more:

The Sunni insurgency, all but decimated in the imagination of the surge advocates, has demonstrated something of a surge of its own in recent weeks. Baghdad, Anbar and Diyala provinces, the hotbeds of the insurgency, have seen a return of high-profile suicide bombing. Prominent collaborators with the U.S., like the so-called "Concerned Local Citizens" militias, have been targeted for death by insurgents and terrorists. "Of late, though, as you’ve been seeing, is certainly an increase in the number of suicide events that occur with individuals, mostly with a suicide vest wrapped around their waist," Adm. Greg Smith, a spokesman for Multi-National Force-Iraq, said in a blogger conference call last week.

Iraq security statistics over the past 13 weeks, obtained exclusively by The Washington Independent, tell the tale. In Baghdad, improvised-explosive device (IED) detonations explosions in Baghdad have ticked up slightly to 131 in January from 129 in December—and the last week of January is not included in these latest figures. Countrywide, there was an increase in IED explosions to 2,291 in December from 1,394 in November, followed by a dip to 1,270 in the first three weeks of January. But the week ending on January 25 saw seven suicide explosions Iraq-wide, the most since the week ending Dec. 21, 2007.

It is too early to conclude that the security gains of the surge are unwinding. But they’re being put under stress in a manner not seen since the so-called "Surge of Operations" began in mid-June. Some speculate that the insurgency, knocked on its heels by the changing tactics of U.S. forces in mid-2007, is beginning to adjust, a few months before the surge draws to a close. "I think there’s some credibility to that argument," said Brian Katulis, a national-security expert at the liberal Center for American Progress. "It all begs the question of what’s the grand endgame."


The endgame is really where its at. It depends on who you talk to of course. For Bush and many conservatives, it is to have a permanent presence that allows them to feed the mouth of the military industrial complex. For the Iraqis it is to control their own country. For the Democrats and progressives, it is to get the hell out of there and let the Iraqi people have what they want, freedom from us.