Setbacks Outweigh Successes - The Surge

This should come as no surprise considering that the so-called surge was not a number deemed necessary by military experts but rather just a number they were able to scrounge up by extending tours of duty to fifteen months. The cowardly president - who is not ashamed to ask for more and more from the same troops - and his desperate followers - followers who are not exactly running to enlist - are just hoping for enough "good news" to maneuver themselves into a better campaigning position.

Bush has not taken any steps to prolong the surge - calling for a draft, if necessary - in fact, he has not taken any steps, whatsoever, to relieve the strain on the military and to protect our position in the world which has been greatly weakened by his ill-conceived war in Iraq.

You don't have to look very hard or far to find the cowards who are holding Bush up. Go to Townhall.com - they don't care about facts, they don't care that there has never been enough troops. They don't even care that the Iraqi people are innocent of any wrongdoing in the attacks of 9/11.

No, all they care about is their bloodlust and hiding behind their blind patriotism, waving their little flags and singing their tearful anthems.

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Posted on Sat, Sep. 08, 2007

Setbacks outweigh successes in Iraq since surge began
By LEILA FADEL
McClatchy Newspapers

•Baghdad has become more segregated. Sunni Muslims in the capital now live in ghettos encircled by concrete blast walls to stop militia attacks and car bombs.

•Shiite militias continue to push to control the city’s last mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhoods in the southwest by murdering and intimidating Sunni residents and, sometimes, their Shiite neighbors.

•Services have not improved across most of the capital. The international aid group Oxfam reported in July that only 30 percent of Iraqis have access to clean water, compared with 50 percent in 2003.

•Each month tens of thousands of Iraqis flee their homes in search of safety.

• Iraqi security forces remain heavily infiltrated by militias, and politicians continue to intervene in their activities.

•Civilian deaths have not decreased in any significant way across Iraq, according to statistics from the Iraqi Interior Ministry, and numbers gathered by McClatchy Newspapers show no consistent downward trend even in Baghdad, despite military assertions to the contrary. The military has provided no hard numbers to back the claim.

...Baghdad

Taking control of Iraq’s capital was at the center of Bush’s surge strategy in January. At least half the U.S. troop surge is taking place in Baghdad and its suburbs, where the U.S. focused on establishing joint security outposts in Iraqi neighborhoods to be closer to areas where sectarian violence was claiming dozens of lives each day.

The military threw up concrete walls across the capital to foil car bombs and stop Shiite militia members or Sunni insurgents from entering targeted neighborhoods. One military official said U.S. troops were erecting walls as “fast as they could build them.” Most “hardened” neighborhoods, encircled with towering gray walls and with single entrances and exits, are Sunni enclaves, military officials said.

The result is a city now sharply divided into sectarian boroughs where the battle lines have only hardened. Some Baghdad residents say they feel somewhat safer in their neighborhoods, but they fear traveling anywhere else in the city.

Anbar province

No one disputes that Anbar province, once the heart of the Sunni insurgency, is far more secure now than it was this time last year.

But what credit American troops can claim for that and how likely it is to remain that way are hotly debated.

The tribal rebellion against al-Qaida in Iraq began last September, well before the surge was even contemplated. That was when tribal leaders, fed up with al-Qaida in Iraq’s attacks on moderate Sunnis and its efforts to impose strict Islamic fundamentalism, formed the Anbar Salvation Council to battle the group.

Tribal sheik Fassal Gaoud, a former Anbar governor, told McClatchy Newspapers in June that the tribes previously had asked for U.S. help in attacking the group but had been rebuffed. By the time U.S. troops began working with the tribes, the battle against al-Qaida in Iraq was well under way. Gaoud was killed in a bombing in July at a hotel in central Baghdad...

Elsewhere in Iraq

In other areas in Iraq, violence has increased and conditions are deteriorating.

Oxfam estimates that 28 percent of Iraqi children are malnourished, compared with 19 percent before the U.S. invasion. No Iraqi whom McClatchy spoke to for this report expressed confidence in the government.

Sunni militants remain openly active in the north. Three weeks ago, fighters for the Islamic State of Iraq, a front organization for al-Qaida in Iraq, paraded through the streets of Mosul, the capital of Nineveh province, said tribal sheik Fawaz Mohammed al-Jarba.

In August, the largest attack since the war began killed at least 322 people in two impoverished villages in Nineveh province, one of a series of deadly bombings, each of which briefly held the title as the deadliest of the year.

A blast in March killed 152 people in Nineveh’s Tal Afar, and 150 people were killed in an explosion in July in Amerli in Salah ad Din province. A double suicide bombing in July left at least 85 people dead in the northern city of Kirkuk.

In the Shiite-dominated south, violence is rising as Shiite militias vie with one another for control.

At least 52 people were killed this month when fighting broke out between the Mahdi Army and the rival Badr Organization during a religious festival in Karbala.

In Basra, a strategic port city on the Persian Gulf, those militias and one from the Fadhila party have fought pitched battles for control, with the death toll rising throughout the year, from 59 in January to 134 in May. In August, 90 people died there.

Overall, civilian casualties in Iraq appear to have remained steady throughout the siege, though numbers are difficult to come by.

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Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker on Monday will warn Congress against making major changes to the war strategy, sources say.