Evaluating The Surge

All of us I know are biting our nails in anticipation of Gen. Petraeus' September report on progress in The Surge. Sure, the White House is actually writing the report and Petraeus himself is already talking about how successful The Surge (aka, the McCain escalation) has been and how we need to keep troops in Iraq until God-knows-when. But what, what, what will his September report say? I know the suspense is overwhelming me.

Meanwhile, I highly recommend while waiting for the Petraeus Report, The surge: a special report by Patrick Cockburn The Independent 08/07/07. Cockburn, author of The Occupation (2006), has consistently done some of the best reporting on the Iraq War. He speaks Arabic himself, which even some of the best-known reporters on the war do not. And he's still out there doing on-the-scene coverage at no small risk to himself. You have to be a bit of a cowboy to be a good war correspondent. And to still be out there as a Western reporter covering this war in the field you have to have a streak of high-wire acrobat or something similar, as well.

His review of The Surge is long but worth reading in its entirety. It certainly challenges the happy-face view of the war presented by the Cheney-Bush administration even as they agitate more actively to attack Iran in order to redeem the situation in Iraq, which is supposedly going just fine. In light of the current escalation of war propaganda against Iran, this paragraph is particularly notable:

A weakness of the US position in Iraq is that it has always exaggerated its own strength and underestimated that of its opponents. Outside Kurdistan, it has no dependable allies. Among Iraqi Arabs, both Shia and Sunni, the occupation is unpopular. A US military study recently examined the weapons used by guerrillas to kill American soldiers, and reached the unsettling conclusion that the most effective were high-quality American weapons supplied to the Iraqi army by the US, which were passed on or sold to insurgents. (my emphasis)

I would hope our friends who are now raring to go with war against Iran would take note of such things.


The rest of us had sure better take note of it. One of the key justifications for war against Iran is that they are supplying weapons that kill Americans to insurgents in Iraq.

Given the nature of the black market for weapons - hell, even for the legitimate market - the country of origin of weapons is hardly evidence of the intent of the government of that country to kill the people against whom they are being used. I'm sure there are some John Birch Society zealots who could explain to you how Islamunist conspirators in the Republican government of the US are consciously conspiring to kill American soldiers with American weapons.

But as the war drumbeat against Iran from our neocons strategists gets louder, it is worth remembering that according to this study to which Cockburn refers, the most effective weapons used by Iraqi guerrillas to kill American soldiers are American weapons originaing with the American government.

Also in Cockburn's report, he describes the selling of The Surge:

There was intense pressure on the US military and the civilian leadership in Baghdad to show that the surge was visibly succeeding. US embassy staff complained that when the pro-war Republican Senator John McCain came to Baghdad and ludicrously claimed that security was fast improving, they were forced to doff their helmets and body armour when standing with him lest the protective equipment might be interpreted as a mute contradiction of the Senator's assertions. When Vice-President Dick Cheney visited the Green Zone, the sirens giving warning of incoming rockets or mortar rounds were kept silent during an attack, to prevent them booming out of every television screen in America. (my emphasis)

This was also an informative observation:

The hidden history of the past four years is that the US wants to defeat the Sunni insurgents but does not want the Shia-Kurdish government to win a total victory. It props up the Iraqi state with one hand and keeps it weak with the other.

The Iraqi intelligence service is not funded through the Iraqi budget, but by the CIA. Iraqi independence is far more circumscribed than the outside world realises. The US is trying to limit the extent of the Shia-Kurdish victory, but by preventing a clear winner emerging in the struggle for Iraq, Washington is ensuring that this bloodiest of wars goes on, with no end in sight.

Read Cockburn's entire report. And remember it when the official Petraeus Report comes out. With its now-completely-unknown conclusions, of course.

Tags: iraq war, mccain, mccain escalation, patrick cockburn, petraeus, surge

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