New meanings for surge success

By Libby

Well here's shocking news for you -- not.

WASHINGTON — U.S. military leaders in Iraq are increasingly convinced that most of the broad political goals President Bush laid out early this year in his announcement of a troop buildup will not be met this summer and are seeking ways to redefine success.

That pretty well could describe any three month period in the entire history of the invasion and ensuing occupation and so could this.

With overhauls by the central government stalled and with security in Baghdad still a distant goal, Petraeus' advisors hope to focus on smaller achievements that they see as signs of progress, including local deals among Iraq's rival factions to establish areas of peace in some provincial cities.

Of course, the tactical genuises who engineered this plan anticipate that the lack of measureable progress won't sit well with either Congress or the public, especially considering the rising death rates for US troops, but they do at least have a plan to respond to critics.

Military officers said they understood that any report that key goals had not been met would add to congressional Democrats' skepticism. But some counterinsurgency advisors to Petraeus have said it was never realistic to expect that Iraqis would reach agreement on some of their most divisive issues after just a few months of the American troop buildup.

Well that's certainly not what they said when they unveiled this grand "new" plan that Bush imperiously ordered in the face of overwhelming objections by nearly all quarters.

In other words, they lied through their teeth -- again -- in order to gain support for another Friedman unit worth of delay of the inevitable, that they knew all along wouldn't be enough to solve anything and with apparent full knowledge that it would likely make things much worse in the short run, all the better to excuse an continued escalation into the foreseeable future.

These people aren't running a war, they're playing a demented game of Risk where human lives are treated as being as expendable as playing cards and the only winners are going to be the corporations and politicians who make money on and accrue power with endless wars.

If this sort of deceit isn't criminal - it sure as hell should be.