A Real Cream Puff

In Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, I recall that the packing house workers are scammed by being shown a crappy house that's been slapped up with a fresh coat of paint to hide what a piece of junk it really is. After a short while of living in the house the poor families realize they've been had. Can it be just over a year ago that Bushco was slapping some super-duper Surge™ paint on its destroyed house of Iraq and daring to sell it as a real bargain fixer-upper? I have to admit that appalling as it was, I was in awe of the chutzpah of Bush, and stunned by how ready the press was to put its money on the whole scam. In spite of the slight downturn in fresh corpses from the US built Iraqi Carnage Factory, there never was any "success" of the Surge™. Yes, there was an eventual lowering daily US troop deaths and headline grabbing car and truck bombings, but what movement was ever made toward solving any of the core problems plaguing the Bush-Iraq project? The real success of the the Surge™ was its role in postponing the coming implosion of Iraq long enough for Bush and friends to hand this disaster off to the next administration. In that sense the Surge™ was a total success...until now.

This week Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi army cease-fire looks like its about over and the production of corpses in Iraq seems to be ramping up again. On NPR, in spite of some decent reporting on the ground from Garcia-Navarro, the whole framing of the issue is how the end of the cease-fire threatens all the wonderful blessings of Surge™. Here's a sampling of the coverage:

• Morning Edition, March 24, 2008 (Guy Raz): "from Petraeus and Admiral Fallon it's pretty straightforward, come August, General Petraeus wants to see a temporary freeze on the troop withdrawals. He basically wants to see whether 135,000 troops will be able to have the same impact on security and stability as a 160,000..."
• All Things Considered, March 24, 2008 (Anne Garrels): Younis, an Iraqi, "credits the US troop surge with improving security."
• Morning Edition, March 25, 2008 (Lourdes Garcia-Navarro): ""Well, that's right, the surge is credited with working for three reasons....So the surge is being reversed now."
• Morning Edition, March 26, 2008 (Inskeep): "Just when many reports were focusing on improvements to Iraq's security, the country is facing a grave challenge, maybe the worst challenge to Iraq's security in more than a year."

It amazes me how this narrative develops a life of its own: the Surge™ was successful, security was so much better, things were really looking up and now those darn sectarian militants are ruining all the progress. Seriously, when I read a piece such as this one from TomDispatch.com about how the Surge™ first accelerated blood-letting and ethnic cleansing, I just wonder how anyone with a heart could consider it a "success."