While the mainstream media devote hours of analysis to lipstick-gate, they continue to accept without question the Bush and McCain claim that the surge in Iraq has been a success. One doesn’t have to look far to find example after example of this being put forward as a self-apparent truism. The logic behind the reporting is little more than, “Look, the violence is down, therefore the surge has worked.” Forget the over-arching goal of the surge was to bring about political reconciliation between the conflicting groups in Iraq. In reality, the political situation is worse than ever. As Brian Katulis of the Center for American Progress writes:
The greatest myth promoted by Bush in his speech [at the National Defense University] was found in this line: “Political reconciliation is moving forward, and the Iraqi government has passed several major pieces of legislation.” By overstating the meagre steps taken by Iraq’s leaders in barely passing a few relatively insignificant laws in their parliament, Bush’s statement ranks right up there with his 2003 “mission accomplished” speech and vice-president Dick Cheney’s assertion that the insurgency was in its “last throes” in 2005.
Katulis continues:
The surge has frozen into place the accelerated fragmentation that Iraq underwent in 2006 and 2007 and has created disincentives to bridge central divisions between Iraqi factions. Moreover, rather than advancing Iraq’s political transition and facilitating power-sharing deals among Iraq’s factions, the surge has produced an oil revenue-fuelled, Shia-dominated national government with close ties to Iran. This national government shows few signs of seeking to compromise and share meaningful power with other frustrated political factions.
So much for political reconciliation. Rather than furthering steps toward some form of power sharing, the surge has solidified the divisions unleashed by the invasion and occupation of Iraq. But McCain, Bush, and the media will inevitably make the case that at least the surge has reduced violence. This is the core of the “surge worked” hypothesis, yet it rests on a basic logical fallacy. Just because Y came after X, it doesn’t follow that X caused Y. Professor Juan Cole recently pointed this out with regards to media commentary on the surge.
The reality is far more complex than this simplistic narrative. An important factor to declining levels of violence was the so-called Sunni Awakening movement in Anbar province in which the US allied with, armed, and paid Sunni insurgents to fight Al-Qaeda. But this began before the surge, and there is no reason to believe this strategy required an increased troop level. Cole agrees:
In al-Anbar Province, among the more violent in Iraq in earlier years, the bribing of former Sunni guerrillas to join US-sponsored Awakening Councils had a big calming effect. This technique could have been used much earlier than 2006, indeed, could have been deployed from 2003, and might have forestalled large numbers of deaths. Condi Rice forbade US military officers from dealing in this way with the Sunnis for fear of alienating US Shiite allies such as Ahmad Chalabi. The technique was independent of the troop escalation. Indeed, it depended on there not being much of a troop escalation in that province. Had large numbers of US soldiers been committed to simply fight the Sunnis or engage in search and destroy missions, they would have stirred up and reinforced the guerrilla movement.
An additional reason for the reduced violence in Iraq has been the unilateral cease-fire of the Mahdi Army ordered by Moqtada al-Sadr. Gen. Patraeus even admits this fact, stating that the “Sadr trend stands for service to the people,” and that he hopes Sadr’s organization will become “constructive partners in the way ahead.” While Patraeus would like to see the cease-fire as a result of the surge, the reality is again more complicated. Cole sees the successful ethnic cleansing of Baghdad – in which it has become a mostly Shiite city with almost no mixed communities and others separated by walls – as an important reason for the Mahdi Army’s cessation of hostilities because this was one of their major aims. As well, their pro-Iranian Shiite rivals, which include the Iraqi state, were becoming much more powerful militarily in relation to Moqtada al-Sadr’s organization.
Ethnic cleansing in Iraq points to a darker aspect of the surge, in which what so many call “success” is the result of brutality and violence. Robert Parry also makes this point:
With the total Iraqi death toll estimated in the hundreds of thousands and many more Iraqis horribly maimed, the society has been deeply traumatized. As tyrants have learned throughout history, at some point violent repression does work.
But this dark side of the “successful surge” is excluded from the U.S. political debate. As during the pre-invasion period, the Washington press corps acts more like Bush’s propagandists than anything close to skeptical journalists.
Instead media commentators waste our time with meaningless questions and speculation about what Barack Obama actually meant when making a comment about lipstick on a pig. Well all I can say, at least there are alternatives to the he-said-she-said style of reporting that passes for journalism and analysis. The following video is a commentary by Aijaz Ahmad from TheRealNews.com. It was originally broadcast following Bush’s State of the Union address in early 2008. Ahmad covers some of the issues I mention above and provides compelling reasons to question much of the conventional wisdom.
Technorati Tags: Election 2008, George W. Bush, Iraq, Iraq surge, media, propaganda
