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See You In September

This concerns the “surge” and the recent remarks by one Maj. Gen. Mixon about troop levels in Diyala and the ineffectiveness of the Iraqi government.  What seems striking about this story is how closely Gen. Mixon’s complaints about the Iraqi government seem to track with the warnings of certain war opponents who said that the “surge” […]

This concerns the “surge” and the recent remarks by one Maj. Gen. Mixon about troop levels in Diyala and the ineffectiveness of the Iraqi government.  What seems striking about this story is how closely Gen. Mixon’s complaints about the Iraqi government seem to track with the warnings of certain war opponents who said that the “surge” was doomed to failure because of the weakness and compromised nature of the Iraqi government.  They do not seem to bear out the constantly optimistic assessments of war supporters who have interpreted every event for the past four months as some sort of vindication for the “surge.” 

As others have noted before, when things have seemed to improve temporarily, they say, “The surge did it!”  When things seem to be getting worse, they say, “The surge is making the enemy desperate!”  Presumably when Sadr stands beside Maliki in the center of the Green Zone in triumph, these people will say, “The surge has lulled them into a false sense of security!”  Even then, when someone at home criticises the “surge” as a bad plan, they will still say, “You don’t see the big picture.  This was just the first surge of many, with each one being ever more powerful and surgish than the last.  We may have lost the surge, but we will win the best-of-five surge series.” 

Taken together with the news that the Iraqi parliament may adjourn for a couple months and the report that the “surge” will continue well into 2008 (which means it isn’t much of a “surge,” and is actually an escalation, as David Corn and Jim Pinkerton pointed out recently), it is becoming increasingly difficult to imagine how all of this will turn out well.  If the Iraqi government keeps confirming just how useless it is, while our government continues to pursue a tactical plan that depends heavily on the Iraqi government not being useless and actually pursues this plan for over a year, Americans will have been dying at higher rates for roughly a year while the vital element of the entire plan has simply failed to materialise.  Meanwhile, political support for the effort has started crumbling because all of these problems are becoming common knowledge, and the start of September has become the much-discussed point when that support will begin to collapse rapidly.

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