Devotees of President Obama’s plan to escalate the war in Afghanistan hope to repeat the "success" of our surge in Iraq. That’s likely to prove easier to accomplish than even the most rabid Afghanistan surge proponent dares to hope.
The Iraq surge was already in motion in January 2007, when Bush and Cheney flipped off the Iraq Study Group and decided to escalate the war with David Petraeus, the "Teflon General," at the helm of the operation. A shameless self-promoter, "King David" created the illusion of a successful surge by lowering violence statistics through his usual method of operation: hand out weapons to the bad guys, bribe the bad guys not to use the weapons, and pretend to be shocked, shocked when the bad guys take the bribes and use the weapons anyway.
Petraeus’ personal stenographer, former journalist Thomas E. Ricks, admits that Petraeus misled Congress and the public into thinking he was trying to end the war when he was in fact laying "the groundwork for a much more prolonged engagement in Iraq."
Three years after the surge began, violence shows no signs of disappearing. Holiday attacks were especially brutal. Mosul Mayor Zuhair Muhsen al-Aaraji escaped an assassination attempt on Christmas Eve. (Mosul is the town Petraeus supposedly "tamed" during his first tour in Iraq. Within weeks after he left and the graft well ran dry, Mosul went up for grabs and has been a trouble spot ever since.)
Catch the rest at Antiwar.com.