Hit squads

Bob Woodward tells us that the escalation in Iraq (known in marketing-speak as the surge) didn't have as much effect as the Sunni changes (marketing: Anbar Awakening) nor a previously unreleased program of assassination (thin marketing: secret killing). He also likens the assassination campaign to the Manhattan Project.

First, let me say that war is about killing. Targeting that killing is in fact better than not targeting it, so I have no problem in principle with assassination as a tool of war. (As a tool of statecraft? Another matter entirely.)

Assassination is not new. Fiction has been written and filmed about it, and maybe a little non-fiction, too. We used it in Vietnam, though less successfully than the Viet Cong.

That means that even though Woodward is keeping mum (he's a journalist who requires elite access, after all) about what exactly is new. But the stunning "Manhattan Project" label is a clue.

I think that this campaign must have involved massive technology, though not quite to the level of "Déjà Vu". My guess: Tons of electronic surveillance of every phone call, email, movement, and purchase of the Iraqis and massive NSA keyword searching and machine translation (since so many of our military speakers of Arabic were too gay to be welcome to help), followed by human translation of data-mined messages and fact bases.

In short, I'd guess that the military massively replicated what the Clinton administration had deployed in prototype against Osama bin Laden and the Bushists scaled up under John Poindexter and his Carnivore-building ilk to watch Americans. If so, it's quite a technical achievement, though it does call into question why we haven't cared enough to find bin Laden himself.

Update (9/3/11): I was a little bit off here but not much. See this new item for follow-up.

Nasty, brutish, and long

The escalation branded the 'surge' by the Bushists was timed, intentionally or not, to follow ethnic cleansing rather than to prevent it. Meanwhile, those torture rooms that the neocons told us they had closed were still operating - and not just under our supervision.

Update: Newsweek has the happy talk. Swimming pools! Groovy. Of course, two drownings, no female swimmers, no Sunnis from next door, and outrageous expenditures. In short, Iraq.

Screw the troops

Duhbya is still pretending Petraeus is in charge of keeping troop levels escalated, Gates is saying that he's going to shorten tours of duty, and the Joint Chiefs want more boots in Afghanistan.

The numbers don't add up. Hey, this is Bushworld, after all, where all the math is fuzzy, and all the accountability falls low in the social classes.

But something will subtract down, and that'll wind up being the time between tours.

"Hi, hon. Nice to see you kids. Mom, Dad, I wish I could've been here when you were in the hospital. Sorry, hon, gotta go back over there. Connecting on Southwest. Love you all."

In the words of John Prine, your flag decal won't get you into heaven any more.

More surges

Trying something new...

(click here to view)

Joel Pett Lexington Herald-Leader Mar 6, 2008 EditorialCartoonists.com

Burying the bullshit

So, the military is making up numbers to justify the escalation. And the Washington Post is burying it on A16. I'm sure it'll be front page news when Gen. Petraeus reads his dictation from the White House. The only thing that's dropped dramatically is the credibility of the Bushists and their politically reliable officers.

Recycling - even Republicans do it

Tony Snow is going to take a pass on selling this stale, shopworn bullshit. They said this in 2003 and every few months since then. When is the press going to report the context?

"For the twelfth time since the invasion in March 2003, the White House hinted of troop withdrawal plans in the indefinite future."

"Lt. Gen. Odierno stated that the surge escalation will end sometime in 2008, tripling the length of the plan when President Bush first announced it."

Is the whole press corps smoking so much pot that they can't remember hearing this stuff before? Or are they just eager to get over to the RNC cocktail party to graze on primo jumbo shrimp and Grey Goose martinis?

Is the escalation working?

In today's media environment, anything positive that a liberal says about the escalation will become Bushist propaganda instantly and permanently. On account of this, anti-war liberals should not take the Lieberman path.

But that's a different question from the original one: is the surge working?

Since they're politicians, the Bushists did not set any specific criteria for success. That's too risky; better to have latitude after the fact to argue the escalation was a success. I hope they had eyes-only objective criteria written down somewhere in advance but with this bunch of losers, I doubt it.

What hopes did Americans have when the escalation began? I see the goal as improving security to gain two things:

• a greater sense of safety and relief for those Iraqis on all sides who are tired of violence - that way, they might stop supporting or acquiescing to their faction's killers
• a chance for the Iraqi political authorities to reach compromise and institute effective civil government

The first is primary since it's the mechanism to bring about the second. The proof of success of the escalation would be a lasting effect on the level of violence in Iraq - fewer dead, fewer bombings, etc. It wouldn't hurt if the infrastructure improved at least to Saddam-provided levels.

Has violence diminished? Early in the escalation, the answer was unequivocally 'no'. More Americans were dying; no fewer Iraqis were dying. Now, I don't know.

If the trend in violence is clearly not better, the escalation failed. If it is better, the escalation still has some hope of success.

Normally, I would say that judging this is complicated by the fact that the U.S. military won't try to keep civilian casualty statistics. But since nothing coming out of the executive branch is credible in the Bush Administration, at least without outside confirmation, we'll just have to rely on the information of others.

For now, that information is equivocal. Most of the positive news emphasizes a lower death toll month-to-month, often following a bad month. Really, I'd need to see a clear trend to reach even a tentative conclusion.

If by some miracle the escalation has actually worked, we won't actually know until it is over. Mere suppression by superior force of the civil war engulfing Iraq is not enough achieve lasting civil order.

We're not going to get that sort of clear indication, I'm afraid. Instead, we'll get mushy, cherry-picked statistics and sweet, too-good-to-be-true anecdotes such as the one the Washington Post published Thursday.

Politically, liberals should say things like, "There would be more hope if the Bush Administration had pushed the Iraqis to get off their duffs and achieve some, any political progress. That would make use of the sacrifices of our troops."