The Daily Background

Bush said of the “surge” today in his weekly radio address:

“We’re still at the beginning of this offensive, but we’re seeing some hopeful signs.”

Uh, is it just me, or have we been in “the beginning” of the “surge” for six months now? Bush announced his “surge” plan on January 10th, and the Administration says it formally began on Valentine’s day (February 14th). Two weeks, and we’ll have been doing this for half a year. If this is just “the beginning” of the “surge,” then does Bush expect the “surge” to last another five years or something? Or is the beginning super long, and the middle really short? Seriously, what does he want us to believe?

Here’s Bush on his signs of success, same link:

He cited signs of progress that have been made since the completion of a troop surge earlier this month. “We’re still at the beginning of this offensive, but we’re seeing some hopeful signs,” Bush said. “We’re engaging the enemy, and killing or capturing hundreds.”

Other accomplishments Bush cited included a decrease in suicide attacks and car bombings over the past two months, a significant increase in discovery of arms caches since last year, and a reduction in sectarian murders since January.

The article then notes that “The president did not refer to the Pentagon report of 230 American deaths in April and May, the deadliest two-month period since the start of the war.” How convenient.

This is the exact same rhetoric that pro-”surge” kool aid drinkers have been saying all along. Check this article from The Economist, on March 1st, almost four months ago, titled “Is the surge beginning to work?“

IT IS very early days, but American officials in Baghdad say that the first signs of a joint American-Iraqi effort to stem the sectarian mayhem in the Iraqi capital are hopeful. Only one of five planned extra American brigades has yet been deployed. It will be several months before the full reinforcement needed for President Bush’s vaunted “surge” is complete. But the Americans claim to see an improvement on the streets already.

And what progress has happened since March? In the beginning of May, the Washington Post wrote about secret leaked statistics:

More than three months into a U.S.-Iraqi security offensive designed to curtail sectarian violence in Baghdad and other parts of Iraq, Health Ministry statistics show that such killings are rising again.
[…]
Aggregate figures for Baghdad and eight other provinces also show recent increases: In January, 360 bodies were found; in February, 400; in March, 451; in April, 421; and from May 1 to 22, 443.

In the beginning of June, on a weekend when 14 American soldiers were killed in Iraq, the Post reported about even more increasing violence:

May, with 127 American fatalities, was the third-deadliest month for U.S. troops since the 2003 invasion.
[…]
The intensity of combat and the greater lethality of attacks on U.S. troops is underscored by the lower ratio of wounded to killed for May, which fell to about 4.8 to 1 — compared with an average of 8 to 1 in the Iraq conflict, according Pentagon data. “The closer you get to a stand-up fight, the closer you’re going to get to that 3-to-1 ratio” that typified 2oth-century U.S. warfare, said John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org, a defense information Web site.

According to recent polls, 76% of Americans think the “surge” is failing (and even Bush’s new War Czar is worried about it).

Filed under: Z-TDB Blog