Paul Craig Roberts explains that the "surge" and it's alleged success is just a continuation of the lies and deceptions of the Bush administration and it's neocon allies.
It is impossible to keep up with all the Bush regime’s lies. There are simply too many. Among the recent crop, one of the biggest is that the "surge" is working.
Launched last year, the "surge" was the extra 20,000–30,000 US troops sent to Iraq. These few extra troops, Americans were told, would finally supply the necessary forces to pacify Iraq.
This claim never made any sense. The extra troops didn’t raise the total number of US soldiers to more than one-third the number every expert has said is necessary in order to successfully occupy Iraq.
The real purpose of the "surge" was to hide another deception. The Bush regime is paying Sunni insurgents $800,000 a day not to attack US forces. That’s right, 80,000 members of an "Awakening group," the "Sons of Iraq," a newly formed "US-allied security force" consisting of Sunni insurgents, are being paid $10 a day each not to attack US troops. Allegedly, the Sons of Iraq are now at work fighting al Qaeda.
This is a much cheaper way to fight a war. We can only wonder why Bush didn’t figure it out sooner.
And as I discussed
here it was also a matter of timing - the surge didn't begin until the ethnic cleansing in Baghdad was nearly complete.
The "surge" was also timed to take account of the near completion of neighborhood cleansing. Most of the violence in Iraq during the past five years has resulted from Sunnis and Shi’ites driving each other out of mixed neighborhoods. Had the two groups been capable of uniting against the US troops, the US would have been driven out of Iraq long ago. Instead, the Iraqis slaughtered each other and fought the Americans in their spare time.
In other words, the "surge" has had nothing to do with any decline in violence.
With the Sunni insurgents now on Uncle Sam’s payroll, with neighborhoods segregated, and with al Sadr’s militia standing down, it is unclear who is still responsible for ongoing violence other than US troops themselves. Somebody must still be fighting, however, because the US is still conducting air strikes and is still unable to tell friend from foe.
I think the real purpose of the surge was to keep the lid on the bubbling cauldron that is Iraq until after the November elections so that the next president will take the hit for the loss.
