The Surge is Working. Right?

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Written by Meteor Blades

by: Meteor Blades

Saying 'the surge is working' has worked pretty well for the Cheney-Bush regime the past few months. It certainly calmed down the megamedia, which – after years of publishing and broadcasting stuff about Iraq quaffed from the Kool-Aid fire hose – had actually started doing the job they should have started in January 2002 when the White House initiated its march-to-war publicity tour.

After years of fawning and phony patriotism in the aftermath of September 11, the megamedia finally began to make visible some ugly truths that had previously been confined to the world of the bloggerati.

Then came the "surge," the escalation designed to undermine the lukewarm recommendations of the Iraq Study Group. Within a couple of months, the coverage, except for the McClatchy people (and a few others whom you can call journalists without meaning the word as an epithet) were right back where Editor and Publisher Editor Greg Mitchell wrote about in So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits--and the President--Failed on Iraq.

As I noted two weeks ago in Megamedia Coverage on Iraq Fuels Ignorance, one measure of how lousy coverage of the war affected Americans was the plunge in those who knew how many of their fellow Americans had died because of the Iraq invasion and occupation. In August 2007, 54% could correctly put the number of deaths at 3500. By the first of this month, only 28% could say the number had reached 4000. The graph shows you what’s been happening. Of course, the U.S. media have never done a good job of covering the Iraqi fatalities and other horrors of that continuing disaster.

As clammyc points out today in his Diary, Iraq is imploding right before our eyes, the surge isn’t working. It never was.

CNN senior military analyst Air Force Maj. Gen. Donald Sheppard, says: "This is intra-Shia. This is not Sunni vs. Shia, this is not civil war, this is not sectarian violence, it's intra-Shia politics for control of the government." Yep, all those previous problems have been resolved, this is something new and it’s being dealt with. Uh-huh.

Of course, intra-Shi’ite violence is occurring. But something new? Do the names Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim and Muqtada al-Sadr not ring any bells? Moreover, it’s not just a clash in Basra, as if the situation in Basra weren't bad enough.

From the BBC – Baghdad under curfew amid clashes:

A curfew has been imposed on Baghdad amid continuing clashes between Shia militias and Iraqi security forces.

From The Guardian - Mass grave found in Iraq

American and Iraqi troops today unearthed 37 bodies in a mass grave north-east of Baghdad, the US military said.

The corpses were discovered near Muqdadiyah, an area that has seen frequent fighting between US troops and Sunni insurgents in the volatile Diyala province.

From Der Spiegel – Americans Caught in Crossfire between Radicals and Iraqi Government:

With its swimming pools, manicured gardens and friendly Iraqis, Baghdad's Green Zone was long seen as a luxurious, high-security enclave for Americans and their friends in a country rocked by violence. Now the oasis of security is under siege.

The attacks on the "IZ," or "International Zone," as the US military has dubbed the former Karkh neighborhood, represent one of the biggest challenges to the American forces in Iraq to date. The enclave covers less than seven square kilometers (2.7 square miles) and houses the headquarters of the US armed forces and their allies. Until the beginning of the week, the enclave was considered the safest place in a country plagued by violence and terror.

From The New York Times: Thousands in Baghdad Protest Basra Assault

The United States ordered embassy personnel to stay in reinforced structures because of incoming fire that killed an American on Thursday, the second U.S. fatality this week in the heavily fortified Green Zone.

Meanwhile, says McClatchy, the President makes a speech. Bush: 'Normalcy is returning to Iraq'.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said in a CNN appearance Sunday that there's been "foot-dragging" by Iraqi leaders on key political disputes. What's needed, Wyden said, is to get troops out of Iraq. "It seems to me you put off those troop withdrawals, you send exactly the wrong message to the Iraqis," he said. ...

"When it takes time for Iraqis to reach agreement, it is not 'foot-dragging,' as one senator described it," Bush said. "They're striving to build a modern democracy on the rubble of three decades of tyranny." He noted that the U.S. Congress itself has been on a "two-week Easter recess."

Bush gave a litany of economic and political developments in Iraq, such as falling inflation and the approval this month of a provincial powers law, that he said showed that the "surge" of 30,000 U.S. troops into Iraq last year has met its goal. That goal was to improve security so that Iraqi leaders could begin political reconciliation.

"The surge has opened the door to ... strategic victory," Bush declared.

Ah yes, stay the course. 4004 dead American military personnel as a consequence of an invasion and occupation based on lies. If you don't count the suicides. 4313 dead "coalition" fighters altogether. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million or more dead Iraqis.

Normalcy in Iraq

This article was originally published at: http://www.dailykos.com/main/3

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