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Posted on Wednesday 9 April 2008

Note that there were two previous "surges." One at the end of 2004 [during the election] and another in late 2005. The second was presumabely because of increased violence. I guess you could call that hump in late 2006 a "surglet." The graphs [from Petraeus last September and the Brookings Institute] make it clear that "surging" works – until you "unsurge." This most recent "surge" worked in the same sense. I expect this data isn’t lost on General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker. They know that reducing the troop levels has had a rebound effect with increased violence in the past.  They didn’t say it, but they are implying that if we don’t de-escalate too quickly, maybe they’ll have made enough changes, and the Iraqi Army will be strong enough, to make things different this time.

I personally heard nothing today that suggested that this wish was anything more than that – a wish. Given the circumstances, I have the same wish, but I have great skepticism that it can become a reality. If our problem were simply al Qaeda in Iraq ["two thousand"] or the other Sunni Insurgency Groups, that wish might seem reasonable. But what I heard today was something quite different. There is a fundamental Power Struggle in the Shia Community – al-Malaki versus al-Sadr being the most obvious, but not the only one. The analogy between Iraq and Yugoslovia is unavoidable. With the removal of the Despot, the old wars are reignited.

Are we the solution? I doubt it. There is no great love for Americans in Iraq. There is no particular reason for them to care about our fate. There hardly seems to be any "gratitude" for our invasion. Bush and Cheney’s fantasy of evangelic democracy seems all but forgotten by the rest of us. Our problem is al-Qaeda. They kept talking about Iran today. I’m not sure that Iran is our problem either, at least not our problem in Iraq. If Arabs were invading Canada, we’d be giving them aid and weapons too. I’m not sure that the al Qaeda we’re fighting in Iraq is the al Qaeda that’s our problem. They’re in Pakistan right now, and Afghanistan right now. So, the threats Petraeus, Crocker, Bush, Cheney, McCain keep talking about are their projections, not necessarily their knowledge.

In all of this, the "surge" seems superfluous, not really on point. We’d be better placed to spend our time with a "purge" instead of a "surge" – a purge of the bozos who created this mess – so we can think without their interference. You know who they are…

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