Buy me a flute/And a gun that shoots
Tailgates and substitutes/Strap yourself
To the tree with roots/You ain’t goin’ nowhere
— BOB DYLAN
Looking back over the long arc of the war in Iraq – a misadventure that shows no sign of ending any time soon — the predominant themes are the arrogance and ignorance of a presidential administration that has done virtually everything wrong and gotten very little right.
The result is that well into the fifth year of the war there are two enormously significant and diametrically opposite things going on.
The good news is that the Surge finally is reaping benefits.
U.S. deaths total 30 two thirds of the way through October, a pace that could make the toll for the month one of the five lowest for any month in the war. Iraqi civilian deaths stand at about 450, a pace that could make the toll for the month the lowest since the onset of the civil war with the February 2006 bombing of the Golden Dome in Samarra.
The bad news is that the very purpose of the Surge has been fatally undermined.
The Surge was initiated to give Iraqi factions breathing room to work out their differences and move toward an Iraq unified enough and stable enough that U.S. troops could leave in substantial numbers. But that will not be happening because of a tin-horn central government that exists in name only and a U.S. occupation leadership that is unable to grasp the social, economic and cultural barriers standing in the way of democratizing Iraq in any real sense of that word.
Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House.