Iraq
by georgia10
Thu Jan 31, 2008 at 08:33:34 AM PDT
For the first time in five months, month-to-month deaths in Iraq have increased.
As of today, 37 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq. That is the same number of troops that died in May of 2003, when President Bush smiled in front of a "Mission Accomplished" banner and declared that major combat operations in Iraq were over.
That's two more than the number of deaths in May of 2005, when Vice-President Cheney insisted that the insurgency was in its "last throes."
That's six more than the number in March of 2006, when the President insisted that "Iraqis will continue to take more responsibility for their own security, and fewer U.S. forces will be needed to complete the mission."
And that's the same number as the number of American deaths in November of 2007, when, according to the President, the Iraqi government was supposed to "take responsibility for security in all of Iraq's provinces."
As the last several years have proven, military progress in Iraq is illusory without the political progress necessary for long-term stability. The President's strategy of using American troops as a compress works not to heal the underlying cultural and political wound, but only to stem the bleeding. A full blown civil war becomes a low-grade civil war. Instead of dozens of bodies found tortured and beheaded in Baghdad, there were only a dozen headless bodies found there yesterday. Regardless of the level of troops, one thing remains constant: without political progress, the violence continues, steady and horrific -- a nightmare by any other name.
This week, we learned that despite claims that the surge is a "success," it has done nothing but brings us back full circle. Back to a U.S. military presence of some 130,000 troops:
BAGHDAD, Jan. 30 -- Senior U.S. military commanders here say they want to freeze troop reductions starting this summer for at least a month, making it more likely that the next administration will inherit as many troops in Iraq as there were before President Bush announced a "surge" of forces a year ago. [...]
Privately, White House advisers say Bush is loath to do anything that would jeopardize what he sees as hard-won security gains and predict he would be very receptive to any go-slow suggestion from Petraeus.
And certainly, no Republican president would want to "jeopardize" perceived security gains in the months before a presidential election, particularly when it is likely that his party's candidate was a chief proponent of the "surge" strategy.
U.S. military officials in Baghdad say that trends in Iraq are good but that officials back home and indeed the American public may not grasp how uncertain the situation remains.
"We say, 'Violence is down, but' -- and no one hears the 'but,' " said Lt. Gen. James Dubik, who oversees the training and equipping of the Iraqi army and police. "The war is not over."
Maj. Gen. Michael Barbero, a strategic adviser to Petraeus, said that Iraq is "kind of normalizing" but that "it is still tenuous."
And so, here we are, America, championing 37 American deaths as "success." It is a stale "success," recycled year after year to entice the American people and a cowering Congress into giving the administration the funds and support it desires to keep the pipe dream of validation alive.
In the meantime, we have an entire military paralyzed by that tragic circumstance, caught in the middle between an incompetent Iraqi government and an insolent American one. We have a nation trapped in the president's hamster-wheel foreign policy. It is a policy which promises "success" year after year but which has only succeeded in prolonging a conflict that should never have been initiated and that continues to leave constant chaos and fallen heroes in its wake.
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