Post #73

Subject: “The surge is working, the surge is working.” Pt. II

I saw Senator John McCain say – as tho repetition makes it so. It seems the “Straight-Talk Express” has a flat tire! :p

Rajiv Chandrasekaran, the associate editor of “The Washington Post,” former Baghdad bureau chief for the publication, also author of “Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq‘s Green Zone,” said last week regarding John McCain’s view, “… that just today, the U.S. embassy put out an all-hands bulletin to its personnel inside the green zone. The green zone‘s that fortified part of central Baghdad, guarded by hundreds of U.S. troops, surrounded by 17-foot-high concrete blast walls. The new directive, all embassy personnel must wear flak jackets and helmets any time they‘re leaving any building inside the green zone. They‘re also not allowed to congregate by that palace pool, the site of some fairly raucous parties in recent years. And nonessential personnel are not even allowed inside the embassy compound. Why? Because insurgents have been pelting the green zone with literally dozens of rockets and mortars in recent days, and two Americans have been killed in the past week in these attacks. So people inside the green zone, inside supposedly the most secure part of Baghdad, don‘t feel much safer this week than they did last week.”

How many of those dead Americans would say the surge is working!?!

Retired general Barry McCaffrey, who was recently in there with General Petraeus and 16 other senior U.S. commanders, wrote “No Iraqi government official, coalition soldier, diplomat, reporter, foreign NGO,” nongovernmental organization individual, “nor contractor can walk the streets of Baghdad, nor Mosul, nor Kirkuk, nor Basra, nor Tikrit, nor Najaf, nor Ramadi without heavily armed protection.”

Again, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, the associate editor of “The Washington Post,” former Baghdad bureau chief for the publication, also author of “Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq‘s Green Zone,” said, “Conditions are Baghdad today are still pretty grim. There are certain places where things have improved. I will hand McCain and the administration that point. But by and large, the city is still incredibly dangerous, incredibly dangerous to foreigners and dangerous to Iraqis. I‘m in touch with Iraqis all the time. They‘re still living under an incredible climate of fear. They‘re still afraid to go out and about. They don‘t know whether the trip they‘re making to the market or the mosque or to work is going to be the last trip they ever make. So there‘s still a climate of fear. I don‘t think that the Iraqis would take the same sanguine view that Senator McCain has.

So, what’s going on? Why would McCain carry water for George W. Bush? Uh, politics, pure and simple, politics – McCain is not really carrying Bush’s water, tho. McCain is probably privately hoping that the surge fails and that the Democrats pull the plug. He can run for President, saying “if the surge had of been substantial and sustained, as I’d wanted. it would have worked – after all, I saw progress in early ’07.”

America’s interests = ending the war and not leaving chaos behind. Stopping the bleeding so that we may respond with our military to other threats -- such as the on-going threat from Afghanistan.

Bush’s interests = handing off responsibility for his mess to the next President.

McCain’s interest = running for President.