Sleight of Hand Surge

[babylonsister]

Sleight of Hand Surge
Jeff Huber | November 21, 2007

To beg from a favorite expression of my grandmother's, I don't know whether to laugh or cry over the latest "good news" from Iraq. As we begin the twelve-month countdown to next November's election, friends of the Bush administration are once again declaring "mission accomplished" in Iraq.

An editorial in the November 12th Los Angeles Times by David B. Rivkin Jr., a former Bush II policy aide (and Donald Rumsfeld apologist), stated, "By every objective measure of military performance, the United States' surge of military forces into Iraq has been a great success." The next morning, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough squealed, "The surge has worked." On November 19th, Kimberly Kagan, wife of surge architect Frederick Kagan, wrote in a Weekly Standard article titled "How They Did It" that "With violence falling sharply, Iraqis are no longer mobilizing for full-scale civil war."

All this right wing hoopla conveniently ignores the Baby Ruth floating in the punch bowl: 2007, the year of the surge, has seen the largest annual toll of U.S. troop deaths (854) in the history of this woebegone war, and we have the rest of November and December left to go.

Well, all right, not everybody in the administration has ignored this. Colonel Steven Boylan, General David Petraeus's personal public affairs officer, says, "We knew going into this that with the new strategy there was a potential for more casualties." In other words, we knew more troops were going to die so it's okay that they did. See how neat that works?

And nobody in the Bush camp too seems upset about how many troops died this year because not very many of the troops who died this year died in the last three months, and according to administration echo chamberlain Richard Benedetto, the last three months are all that really matter in the killed in action department, and bad on the darn old liberal media for not bringing that to everybody's attention. Sure, it's tough about all those other troops who got killed four or more months ago, but war is hell, haven't you heard? Plus, when you get right down to it, the troops who were killed in the last three months really shouldn't count either, according to Benedetto's reasoning, because there were so darn few of them. Relatively speaking, that is.

The neocons are making hay out of the reduced number of roadside bomb attacks, despite that fact that on November 12th four American soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb. That same day, an American soldier was killed while conducting combat operations in Anbar, but that didn't stop the neocons from continuing to chortle how well things are going in that province. You'll also hear congratulatory rumblings about how well Iraq's security forces are progressing, despite six Iraqi policemen in a town outside Mosul being gunned down in front of their own police station recently. The gunmen? They got away, of course. How's that for police work?

To call what's now happening in Iraq a "great success" because bad things have happened less in the last three months than in the previous several months is exactly like saying losing one leg to a roadside bomb is preferable to losing two legs to a roadside bomb. That's true in a Rovewellian sort of way, but the only thing in this analogy I'd consider a "great success" is losing zero legs to a roadside bomb.

more...

http://www.military.com/opinion/0,15202,156780,00.html

[stillcool]

1. Do these kinds of bombs count?

WASHINGTON, Oct. 12, 2007 – A coalition air strike yesterday that killed terrorists also claimed the lives of a large number of innocent victims, military officials said.

During an operation to pursue senior al Qaeda leaders in the Lake Thar Thar region, troops encountered small-arms fire from the target building. Responding in self-defense, coalition aircraft engaged the enemies inside the building.

After the air strike, ground forces discovered that 15 terrorists, six women and nine children had been killed. Troops determined that two suspects, one woman and three children also were wounded. Ground forces also detained one suspected terrorist after the strike.

(Compiled from Multinational Force Iraq news releases.)

October 31, 2007
To Bomb, Or Not To Bomb
Charles Peña

One of the most famous lines penned by William Shakespeare is from Hamlet's soliloquy, "To be, or not to be: that is the question." In Iraq, the question is whether to bomb or not to bomb. So far this year, the U.S. military is bombing more than last year (1,140 air strikes in the first nine months of this year compared with 229 in all of 2006, which does not include attacks by helicopter gunships) – more, in fact, than the last three years combined.
http://www.antiwar.com/pena/index.php?articleid=11834