That Wind Beneath Your Wings -- Not what you think it is...

Ah, the Kagans America's First Family of War Mongerers (okay, second family) -- they're like the Flying Wallendas of Wankery and criminal appeasement.

Asked on PBS’s The Charlie Rose Show earlier this week about “how fragile” the surge in Iraq is, surge architect and American Enterprise Institute “military analyst” Frederick Kagan declared that “the situation in Iraq today is, I think, not that fragile.” He then added that he believed Iraq would be “fragile” if America made “the mistake of pulling out prematurely.” ...

This, of course, contradicts Iraqi Jesus,:

Kagan’s bold claim about the surge’s lack of fragility is directly contradicted by Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, who told CBS News this week that “while military progress has been made with a ’surge’ of U.S. forces, ‘progress in Iraq is fragile, it is tenuous.’”

In fact, the very next day following Kagan’s remarks, the Guardian reported on one key aspect of the surge’s strategy that is quite fragile: the reliabilty of U.S. alliances with Sunni militia. The report noted that “Sunni militia employed by the US to fight al-Qaida are warning of a national strike because they are not being paid regularly”

Of course, what Kagan said fits what Dick Cheney says to a "T" -- a wet-t. Let's pause to consider shall we?

Kagan likely did not notice this, but in the land of the mighty surge and the great stability:

As many as 20 mortar shells were fired Sunday at the heavily fortified Green Zone, one of the fiercest and most sustained attacks on the area in the last year...

No Americans were killed in the shelling on Sunday, officials said, but mortar shells that fell short of their target killed 13 Iraqis in neighborhoods east of the Green Zone. The first attack, about 6 a.m., sent thunderous booms echoing across the city, shaking buildings and rattling windows.

Although the source of the attacks could not be determined conclusively, two witnesses said the early-morning rounds were fired across the river from the Shiite-dominated Baladiyat neighborhood by militia men who the witnesses believed belonged to the Mahdi Army of the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr.

Yet another sign that the "ceasefire" largely responsible for the drop in deaths from the apocalyptic levels of 2007 to the merely catastrophic levels of 2005 in recent months is ending.

Granted 20 mortar shells toward the Green Zone seems like a pretty big deal, but I've had Republicans tell me Baghdad's doing better at reconciling than Washington, D.C. so I imagine 20 mortars get lauched toward the Capital Complex all the time, right? I don't know for sure, I live in Des Moines and our capital only gets hit up by mortars or RPG's rarely, every couple of weeks tops. But when you are spending $150 billion annually on something as awesome as the Iraqi Occupation you always get more bangs for your borrowed bucks.

Four U.S. soldiers were killed when a bomb hit their vehicle in south Baghdad late Sunday, bringing the number of U.S. service members killed in the Iraq war to 4,000.

The grim milestone came at a time when attacks against the U.S. military are ebbing and officials have claimed significant progress against Iraq's deadly insurgency and sectarian violence. It was reached about 10 p.m. on a day when more than 60 Iraqis were killed and dozens injured in attacks in Baghdad and north of the capital.

Last month deaths in Iraq leaped 20% from the month before. In March, those deaths have already nearly equaled February's total six days earlier.

Yet it is hard to penetrate the shells of cable news talkers over the occasional badly edited sermon by a black minister, that the awesome surge has accomplished so little despite the best efforts of badly used and exhausted American soldiers. Besides John McCain says it's awesome no matter how much he screws up the facts, and his barbecue is delicious and he only makes the occasional racial slur. It's all good to American media -- to the press of countries not so beholden to their corporate overlords? Not so much.