About That Surge...Again

By Cernig

About that Surge again - because every day the "official" propaganda gets catapulted and if there's to be an honest debate then the holes in the official line need to be pointed out every day.

The pro-war Right are making much right now of a USA Today report:

The number of truck bombs and other large al-Qaeda-style attacks in Iraq have declined nearly 50% since the United States started increasing troop levels in Iraq about six months ago, according to the U.S. military command in Iraq.

The high-profile attacks — generally large bombs hitting markets, mosques or other "soft" targets that produce mass casualties — have dropped to about 70 in July from a high during the past year of about 130 in March, according to the Multi-National Force — Iraq.

That no-one knows how MNF-I is defining its terms and therefore no-one has independent figures to just the truth or falsity of such a claim is apparently irrelevant, as is the evidence that the US military are deliberately falsifying other statistics. The military and right-wing bloggers are jumping in excitement like Arlo at a draft board proclaiming the Surge is working.

But as my good friend Kyle Moore points out, only those with deficient reading comprehension could be so ebullient.

AQ and AQI have never posed the largest bloc of violence in the conflict riddled nation. Their presence there is in fact a construct of our presence there, and doesn’t characterized the primary conflict at hand.

To this degree, Bush succeeding in at least minimalizing al Qaeda’s influence in the country is the very least he could do; the tip of the ice berg of responsibility soundly weighing down on his shoulders.

Kyle also points to other possible reasons for any reduction in major attacks - like a slowdown in the Surge.

Here's a key point from the USA Today article those joyful cheerleaders must have overlooked:

Violence from Shiite militias remains strong in some areas. In Baghdad, attacks from powerful armor-piercing roadside bombs, called explosively formed penetrators, or EFPs, increased to 35 in July from an average of 23 per month between March and June, said Maj. Steven Lamb, a spokesman for the U.S. division in Baghdad.

Those EFP attacks are meant to be the primary killer of US troops nowadays but since they aren't "massive publicity-seeking attacks" they aren't included in the US military's own joyous count. Say wha'?

Ignoring the primary sources of new problems in both cherry-picked data and in propaganda pronouncements is what kept the US in the current mess as it just got deeper and deeper. The LA Times today points out that over-simplification of the Iraqi occupation and the various insurgencies has always been a problem-creator for the US. Garbage in, garbage out.