"I came. I saw. I concurred."
That, give or take a Caesarian section, is what many congresspersons have to report when they return from their two-day escorted junkets to Baghdad.
They see that the surge is working, at least inside their double-armored humvees, comprehensively accompanied by U. S. infantry, armored cavalry, and helicopter gunships as they tour two or three secure havens and potemkin bazaars, islands of security in a sea of chaos. They leave reassured that Iraqi police are stepping up to the plate, reconstruction proceeds apace, and color is coming back to the cheeks of the economy. Life is good and the rugs are cheap—or do I have that backwards? Details, details.
Most of these surge supporters are folks who piously believe that HMOs and insurance companies improve healthcare and lower its cost, so Medicare should be privatized. That the insurance companies busily dodging any claim for damages from Hurricane Katrina would do so much better than the government in a world of privatized Social Security. They believed that the Bush tax cuts, concentrating their benefits on the wealthiest one percent of Americans, were just the stimulus the economy needed to get the other 99 percent to spend more as consumers. They opposed regulation, or even transparency, for the hedge funds and mortgage brokers who were feasting on sub-prime borrowers who are now losing their homes. They’re in favor of government eavesdropping on your telephone calls because you can’t be trusted and Alberto Gonzales can.
Their party proclaimed that war heroes like Max Cleland and John Kerry were unpatriotic, so America’s salvation from terrorism could only be trusted to draft dodgers like Bush and Cheney. They gave free reign to air polluters as part of the "Clean Skies Initiative." They turned loggers loose in natural forests in the "Healthy Forests Initiative." They lifted restrictions on dumping cyanide into rivers under the "Clean Streams" Act.
So it should come as no surprise that in the face of increased military casualties, increased civilian deaths, soaring numbers of refugees, a floundering government and a crumbling security force, they would arrive at the happy conclusion that the surge is working.
Veni, Vidi, Vichy.
So what if the sun is going down? It’s morning in America.