The Daily Koshttp://www.dailykos.com/The Surge Becomes the Standard by Devilstower
Thu Mar 27, 2008 at 08:01:52 AM PDT
According to the Pentagon, massive street protests and violence that's already led to more than a hundred deaths is just the kind of progress we wanted in Iraq. The Pentagon says the fighting in Basra between government troops and Shiite militiamen is a good sign because it shows the Iraqi government's resolve and its newfound ability to take on its problems.
Other people might mistake days of chaos fought with the weapons we've provided to both sides as just another pulse in the Iraqi civil war. You know, the one that will only happen if Democrats practice premature evacuation. It's nice to know the smoke rising from the US embassy after days of mortar attacks is the desired result.
How can we know this is a success? Because it means that the troop levels that we once defined as "the surge" will now become the baseline.
An increase in fighting would effectively rule out the chances of additional large-scale U.S. troop withdrawals from Iraq this year. U.S. and Iraqi officials have credited Iraq's recent security gains to three distinct but related trends: the "surge" of 30,000 additional U.S. combat forces, the willingness of Sunni tribal fighters to turn against religious extremists, and a cease-fire by firebrand Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
Few things of late have so highlighted the spectacular break between reality and the "news" as watching reporters talk about "the danger of the cease fire collapsing" against a backdrop of machine gun fire. Clearly the spirit of Baghdad Bob survives.
For your handy reference, here's the Surge in Sixty Seconds.
US forces are expanded by over 30,000.
The situation in Iraq moves from "insanely awful" to "oh my God it's hideous."
We start paying and arming most of the people who were shooting at us to not shoot us
The situation moves back to "insanely awful" but with a side of "now they all have better weapons."
Media declares victory.
People we armed decide to carry on their civil war without us -- back to "oh my God hideous."
We now have to keep more troops in place, just to prevent the badometer from soaring to "10,000 nuns and orphans eaten by rats with a side of Hiroshima" bad.
Win!
The surge worked so well, that we can never, ever "unsurge."
The one point he left out was that the surge worked so well because if you add 30,000 more heavily armed troops into one area crime will go down. Put 30,000 Military with orders too shoot into Washington D.C. and watch the murder rate drop. (Except for possibly the deaths caused by the military.)