Late Nite FDL: The Surge is Sucking
Posted in: "War on Terror", Iraq, Media
You know, if you watch Bill Kristol’s sit-down with Jon Stewart from last night’s “Daily Show”, it is genuinely tempting to want to believe that maybe things are getting better in Iraq. He seems so calm and reasonable, so “serious”.
It kind of makes me wish that I was as credulous and easily gulled as the average Pox News viewer. Then I could actually believe in Kristol’s vision of an Iraq where oodles of ponies and rainbows are just around the corner, and I could be cheerfully unmoved by today’s ugly facts.
At least 175 people have been killed in a series of suicide bomb attacks in northern Iraq, Iraq’s military says.
The blasts apparently targeted a Kurdish religious minority, the Yazidi sect, near Mosul. At least four blasts hit areas which house the community.
A Mosul police source told the BBC that there had been “large loss of life”.
In one of the worst single atrocities in the four-year-old war at least another 200 people were wounded in the bombings in separate areas of the town of Kahtaniya, west of Mosul, Iraqi army Captain Mohammad al-Jaad said.
The attacks on the Yazidi community occurred about 8pm local time leaving whole apartment buildings destroyed and several shops nearby ablaze.
(…)
The attack was the deadliest in Iraq since 215 people were killed in November when mortar rounds and five car bombs killed 215 people in the Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City.
(…)
The huge loss of life came on the same day as dozens of uniformed gunmen in 17 official vehicles stormed an Oil Ministry compound in Baghdad and abducted a deputy oil minister and four other officials.
A total of nine US military deaths were also announced after a transport helicopter crashed near an air base west of Baghdad, killing five troopers. The CH-47 Chinook helicopter had been conducting a routine post-maintenance test flight when it went down near Taqaddum air base. Four other soldiers were reported killed in separate attacks.
But here’s Charles Krauthammer from just a few weeks ago:
By the day, the debate at home about Iraq becomes increasingly disconnected from the realities of the actual war on the ground. The Democrats in Congress are so consumed with negotiating among their factions the most clever linguistic device to legislatively ensure the failure of the administration’s current military strategy—while not appearing to do so—that they speak almost not at all about the first visible results of that strategy.
And preliminary results are visible. The landscape is shifting in the two fronts of the current troop surge: Anbar province and Baghdad.
Yeah, except for the massive car-bombs and scores of dead.
Michael Yon, yesterday:
When I wrote the op-ed piece, “I Have Seen the Horror,” published August 3rd in the New York Daily News, I cited three areas that had experienced dramatic change in 2007—change that convinces me the “surge” is working:
1. Iraqis are uniting across sectarian lines to drive al Qaeda in all its disguises out of Iraq, and they are empowered by the success they are having, each one creating a ripple effect of active citizenship.
2. The Iraqi Army is much more capable now than they were in 2005. They are not ready to go it alone, but if we keep working, that day will come soon.
3. General Petraeus is running the show. Petraeus may well prove to be to counterinsurgency warfare what Patton was to tank battles with Rommel, or what Churchill was to the Nazis.
Watching these chucklefucks race around from “Hardline” to “Hannity and Colmes” to “Late Edition With Wolf Blitzer” and back again insisting that the world is flat and that the sun revolves around it, well, it must be kind of like having kids that are about eight or nine years old and are right on the verge of finding out the truth about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy.
Except when you try to gently break it to these kids that their parents have been leaving the toys under the tree, they insist that you killed Santa Claus and it’s all your fault for not believing. And you’re a bad, bad person who hates America, er, Christmas.
Conservatives, you can clap your hands until your palms bleed and you can scream, “I do believe in fairies, I do, I do, I do!” until you go hoarse, but frankly, the paramedics have been doing chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth for twenty minutes, now, and they’re not getting a pulse. I think it’s pretty clear to everyone but y’all that Tinkerbell is dead. Way dead. All kinds of pushin’ up daisies.
But good luck, I guess. It’s going to suck when you finally figure out the truth. I’ll see if we can arrange to send some grief counselors over to the AEI and the offices of the Weekly Standard. I suspect you’re going to need a whole crowd of them.
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