Last month I took a break from my usual monthly Iraq war casualty roundup nomenclature — Month X of the War By the Numbers — and headlined that post The Month of Lowered Expectations.
Well, we’re more or less back to the usual naming convention this time around, although I did briefly consider something glib (if inappropriate) like Gravity Sucks. This headline certainly would be applicable because the laws of nature, let alone the laws of warfare, have not been repealed by George Bush, whose arrogance is showing some Texas-sized cracks these days as he becomes increasingly isolated from the large majority of Americans who have seen through his deceits and want their fathers, sons, mothers and daughters at arms to come home now.
Expectations for a turnaround in Iraq further diminished in May, the 50th month of the president’s Forever War, and it was 31 days of bloody superlatives:
* The third worst month of the war for U.S. casualties.
* The worst month for U.S. casualties since November 2004 when U.S. forces were repulsed in the first Battle of Fallujah, the first major showdown with the then-emerging insurgency that the vice president was to infamously assert was in “its last throes.”
* The second half of the worst two-month period for U.S. casualties in the war.
But the really big news is that:
Except for small pockets of improvement, notably the growing disaffection between the Sunni insurgency and Al Qaeda, the surge is not working and shows no sign that it will as Iraq continues its slide into chaos. (While the Sunni-Al Qaeda split is welcome, it is incidental to the surge.)
The reason it’s not working is a no-brainer: An 11th-hour change in modus operandi and a paltry 30,000 additional troops are not going to undo the damage inflicted by the White House in four-plus years of stage managing a war that should not have been fought in the first place and was fundamentally misunderstood and underresourced from Day One.
The spike in the U.S. body count is not surprising. General Petraeus and the president himself warned that a consequence of the surge would be an uptick in casualties as U.S. forces put the pedal to the metal, but the fact of the matter is that Iraqi deaths have increased since the surge took hold.
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