Debating The Debate

From Why I feel like a vampire bit me by Avedon Carol:

However, I just about lost the will to live when they were talking about the surge. Since Obama bought into the whole lie about how the surge had worked, he was helpless. McCain just quoted Obama as saying the surge had worked beyond our wildest expectations even though he'd opposed it.

Then he pressed Obama to say that he'd changed his mind about whether there should have been a surge. When Obama wouldn't, McCain compared Obama's apparently stubborn refusal to support the right thing with Bush's similar behavior.

It was a breathtakingly clever bit of manipulation that Obama walked right into by playing along with the out-and-out lie that the surge had done anything to advance any goal other than escalated troop presence and PR for the Permanent Campaign.

It would have been completely avoidable if the Democrats had stuck to the facts on this issue from the beginning: The Anbar Awakening preceded the Surge and had nothing to do with it - it had to do with the fact that we've been paying The Enemy not to attack us. Dems should have been screaming about this, but it's a bit late to introduce this kind of new information on the fly. And the stated purpose of the Surge was that it was supposed to reduce violence so we could leave, but we show no sign of thinking of leaving; ergo, the surge has failed. Period.

McCain also reiterated the whole casting of the occupation as a war we must win rather than go home in defeat. Since the only definition of "win" we've ever been given sounds exactly like "never leave", it would have been good if that question had been put to him. It is claimed that we will leave when things are stable and peaceful, but we haven't been told how we get rid of that tiny little problem of how peace can't break out as long as we are there making war on them.

Read more about the Anbar Awakening (Sunni Awakening) here, here, and here.

Is The Surge Working?

Depends which surge you’re talking about. We definitely do know however, that electricity is not surging in Iraq:

"I felt happy when the U.S. invaded Iraq because I thought the electricity problem will be solved, and we would have it all the time like other countries," Abdul-Kareem Hasan, a trader in Baquba told IPS.

But promises of reconstruction by western contractors proved empty, and there is now less electricity than during the sanctions.

In some cities, homes get electricity just an hour or two a day. Sometimes, there is no electricity for a week. People struggle to get alternative source of electricity.

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John McCain and others talk about how great things are in Iraq. This doesn’t sound like things in Iraq are going very well:

The winter has been hard without electricity. "We use wood fire to warm up the houses," resident Safa al-Hamdani said. "Electric heaters have become useless. So now we use a metal container, say 50cm by 20cm and burn wood in it. We have abandoned the world of modern technology."

"I dream of waking up and having a hot shower," said a local resident. "But I am now exhausted complaining about lack of electricity. I'm sure nobody can bear living in Iraq. It's a country in the stone ages."

George W. Bush pushes a country back to the “stone ages” and then lies to us that the “surge” is working. George W. Bush is the Anti-Midas, everything he touches turns to crap:

Iraq remains a great sump of human degradation and poverty, unaffected by the "surge." It was not a government critic but the civilian spokesman for the Baghdad security plan, Tahseen Sheikhly, who pointed out this week that the city is drowning in sewage because of blocked and broken pipes and drains. In one part of the city, the sewage has formed a lake so large that it can be seen "as a big black spot on Google Earth."

In the coming weeks, we will see the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq by American and British forces on 19 March, and the fall of Saddam Hussein on 9 April. There will be much rancorous debate in the Western media about the success or failure of the "surge" and the US war effort here.

But for millions of Iraqis like Bassim, the war has robbed them of their homes, their jobs and often their lives. It has brought them nothing but misery and ended their hopes of happiness. It has destroyed Iraq.

And we have the audacity to wonder why “they” hate us and want to kill us. Thanks to Georgie and his ilk the next 9/11 will probably be bigger and more devastating than the last one.