THE COLLAPSING MYTH OF "THE SURGE"

The Bush Admiistration and their propaganda mouthpiece, FOX NEWS, are shameless in their lies about "the surge."

They boast about the success of "the surge" when there are reports days after day on this blog indicating just the opposite is true.

But nobody ever lost a bet pointing out all the many ways the Bush Administration and FOX NEWS LIES to the American public.

The sad part is their are still Americans dumb enough to actually believe what the Bush Administation and FOX NEWS are telling them.

Commentary by Bill Corcoran, editor of this blog.


The Collapsing Myth of the Surge

By Brian Katulis

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2008/02/collapsing_myth.html

The easily foreseen consequences of conservatives' surge “strategy” in Iraq are now coming to pass.

The disaffected Sunni groups that turned against Al Qaeda in Iraq are now demanding their due—political power for these “Awakening” groups commensurate with their newfound military clout and their belief that Sunnis should once again be the dominant power in Iraq as they were under Saddam Hussein.

But the fractured Shi'a-led government of prime minister Nouri al Maliki has strongly opposed these efforts, and resisted integrating these irregular forces into the Iraqi government. The looming threat is that the different sides in one of Iraq’s key internal conflicts –supported to varying degrees by the United States over the last year—may start turning their weapons on each other.

That’s the first simmering civil war that could well resume in full force in the coming months.

The second is the Shi’a-on-Shi’a fight, which is also about to get more heated. The reason: Iraq saw a major political setback last week when a key benchmark of political progress—a provincial powers law that set a fall date for provincial elections—was vetoed by the presidency council.

The setback shows that Iraq’s leaders continue to fundamentally disagree about how to share power, relying on U.S. military forces to maintain a haphazard peace while they continue to squabble. When President Bush announced the surge of U.S. military forces, his stated goal was to give Iraq’s leaders some breathing room and space to advance their political transition by making Iraq more stable. The problem with this strategy was that it failed to address the fundamental divisions between different Iraqi factions.

Now, it is increasingly clear that the surge did little more than temporarily mask these divisions by offering support to different factions—support that today further undermines the Iraqi state.

The conservative strategy for Iraq has gotten the U.S. military caught in the middle of these new twists in the old ethnic and sectarian divides that define Iraqi society. The new Sunni militias demand that the U.S. force the Shi'a to grant them their due, and threaten to stop fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq and instead revive the Sunni insurgency. The Shi'a demand that the U.S. limit the growth of these Awakening militias. Both sides are increasingly shooting at American soldiers to get across their arguments.

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