What hath the "surge" wrought?
Does this blog still exist? If so, I'm swooping in to ring in the new year as a Debbie Downer. According to The Independent (via Iraq Body Count):
I feel good about democracy. Barack Obama gives me hope.
Meanwhile, January 11 is an International Day of Action to Shut Down Guantanamo. Write a letter or something.
- The previous year was the second deadliest since the war began.
- Between 22,000 and 24,000 civilians killed.
- The number of civilians killed by the U.S. (mainly due to increased airstrikes) doubled.
I feel good about democracy. Barack Obama gives me hope.
Meanwhile, January 11 is an International Day of Action to Shut Down Guantanamo. Write a letter or something.
posted by to scranton at 7:38 PM
2 Comments:
The Surge (coupled with ethnic cleansing) hath wrought measurable improvement in almost every aspect of the daily lives of Iraqis, and the Democrats don't want to touch it unless they have to--ie. with a McCain primary victory. The second part to Michael Massing's NY Review of Books I think sums up a lot of the continuing horror in Iraq, as well as the improvements. The Dems' position of setting up a date-certain withdrawal of somewhere between one and two years seems like the best bet both for Iraq and politically.
Thanks for the Guantanamo notice.
An interesting followup, courtesy of one Charles J. Dunlap, Jr., in today's NY Times op-ed page:
"Actually, the reality is quite different. The lesson of Iraq is that old-fashioned force works. Add 30,000 of the world’s finest infantry to the 135,000 battle-hardened troops already there, as we have done, and the outnumbered insurgency is in serious trouble. Detain thousands more Iraqis as security threats, and the potential for violence inevitably declines. Press reports indicate that the number of Iraqis in prison doubled over the last year, to 30,000 from 15,000; and while casualty figures are sketchy, military officials told USA Today last September that the number of insurgents killed was already 25 percent higher in 2007 than in all of 2006.
And while the new counterinsurgency doctrine has an anti-technology flavor that seems to discourage the use of air power especially, savvy ground-force commanders in Iraq got the right results last year by discounting those admonitions. Few Americans are likely to be aware that there was a fivefold increase in airstrikes during 2007 as compared with the previous year, which went hand in hand with the rest of the surge strategy. Going high-tech once again proved to be highly successful."
But then: "Regrettably, two other uncomfortable developments also helped suppress violence" [i.e. ethnic cleansing of neighborhoods and temporary Sunni allies in Anbar].
There is a certain irony involved when "old-fashioned force," massive incarceration, and a fivefold increase in airstrikes help to "suppress violence." Whose violence, we might ask?
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