Is The "Surge" Surging? No, It's Not Even Working.

At last, a review of Bob Woodward's new book.

Woodward's appraisal is more nuanced. He argues that the current situation was created by the confluence of three forces of which the troop surge may be the least consequential. More important is a hyper-secret new program (by inference, a combination of technology and operational techniques) that has allowed U.S. forces to identify, locate and kill huge numbers of the insurgency's leaders, including members of Al Qaeda. When military and White House officials learned that Woodward knew of the secret program, they asked that he withhold any details because publication would endanger the operation and compromise its use elsewhere. Responsible though Woodward's decision may be, it lends a fairly frustrating opacity to what is "The War Within's" biggest revelation. The author also argues that the diminution of violence in Iraq owes a great deal to the so-called Anbar Awakening, in which the tribal sheiks in that crucial Sunni-dominated province have turned on Al Qaeda and aligned themselves with the U.S. and the new central government. Woodward points out that the success in Anbar began long before the surge with the Marines' successful counterinsurgency efforts on the Syrian border. The result of those efforts reached critical mass at about the time the surge began. In fact, Woodward quotes a memo from one of Gen. David H. Petraeus' counter-insurgency experts, musing that the troop surge has had the opposite effect from the one intended, which was to give the Maliki government a safe space into which it could extend its influence as a national regime. Instead, the memo argues, the presence of additional U.S. troops has allowed the tribal leaders to assert themselves and their influence not only locally but also on the Baghdad government in an evolving but specifically Iraqi expression of civil society.

Not to mention, as many pundits/loudmouths/blowhards more widely circulated than we are (Bitter? Sure we are!) has, now that Baghdad has pretty much been segregated into all-Sunni or all-Shia neighborhoods, there's no one left to kill. As well as the United Snakes, filthy materialists that they are, having begun to pay the various tribal leaders not to shoot at AmeriKKKan troops, but to shoot w/ us, against all those terrorists, or patriots, or whatever they are. So the surge is as meaningless as virtually anything else Bush has told us, & somehow Obama, when confronted w/ "the surge" by Bill O'Reilly recently on FOX News Channel, didn't refer to this book (Is he so fucking busy on the campaign trail he doesn't know what's going on?) but said "Oh, beyond our wildest dreams," or crap to that effect. Loser.