Wednesday, July 16, 2008

How the Surge Worked

Suicide bombers kill dozens of Iraqi recruits

From The International Herald Tribune

BAGHDAD: Two suicide bombers posing as army recruits struck an Iraqi base just east of Baquba on Tuesday morning, killing at least 35 Iraqi recruits and wounding 63, according to the Iraqi police and medical officials in Diyala Province.

The attack came as Iraqi troops prepared for what their commanders predict will be a challenging fight to try to reclaim large areas of Diyala that remain sanctuaries for Salafist jihadist fighters and other anti-government guerrillas.

The bombers, wearing belts packed with explosives, waded into a crowd of more than 200 recruits just after 8 a.m. and detonated about 30 seconds apart in front of the headquarters of an Iraqi brigade where the recruits had gathered. The attack happened at the Saad military base, which is about six kilometers, or four miles, east of Baquba, the provincial capital."
Once again, we are shown how incredibly wonderfully the Escalation Surge in Iraq has worked. While we are being told that the so-called Surge has been such a wonderful success, the truth is that much of Iraq is still a complete disaster, and that much of the area that has been (relatively) pacified can credit its (relative) stability more to a successful campaign of ethnic cleansing than to any US military strategy. Meanwhile, while the Pentagon tells us that Surge is over, we still have 15,000 more troops in Iraq than when this wonderfully awesome Surge started. As DebinMD at DailyKos correctly notes, the Up-is-Down, Rovian New World Order doublespeak continues unabated.

If there weren't so many dead and severely maimed people left in the wake of this massive tragitastrobacle, one might think that reason and logic were the biggest losses of this horrific War on Iraq. Sadly, anything resembling collective sanity in the USofA is just another corpse that can be found in the blood-drenched streets of Baghdad.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Downtown Dave

I thought of you when I read these two articles on Counterpunch yesterday.

http://www.counterpunch.org/walker07182008.html

http://www.counterpunch.org/cummins07172008.html

Hey man, sorry if that greeting about your head made you uncomfortable at the steering committee shindig. Even though I only met you once before that, I remebered you - in error? - with longer hair.

Downtown Dave said...

Tracy:

I think reasonable people can disagree over whether or not an Obama will be a major step away from Empire, but I also think that it's hard to argue that an Obama administration would be a major step away from a McCain administration, or anyone who represents the extreme right policies of today's GOoPers.

I agree wholeheartedly with the ideology reflected in Counterpunch stories, the Green Party, Ralph Nader, etc. But ideology and national electoral politics are not necessarily the same thing.