and on How its "Calm" is Artificially Produced" which states "Bush made a surprise visit to Al-Anbar Province on Monday, as part of his propaganda drive to get Americans to think we should stay in Iraq because "progress" is being made....
Now the 'good news' appears (I swear to God) to be that you can "walk" in Iraq.
That's the good news. The 7 billion people in the world walk every day, in most of the world's locales. Now it is an achievement to walk. That's good news of the highest order. Only, if you are American in Fallujah you might need a company of Marines with you so that you can . . . walk.
Is al-Anbar Province really paradise, as Bush suggested?
Al-Anbar residents killed 20 US troops in July. The total US fatalities in July were 79 according to icasualties.org, and some of those were presumably from accidents, etc. So al-Anbar, despite being reduced to the stone age, managed to kill a fourth or more of all US troops killed in combat in July. Al-Anbar is roughly 1/24 of Iraq by population. So it killed six times more US troops than we would have expected based on its proportion of the Iraqi population.
That's what the Bushies are celebrating, that the deadly al-Anbar has been wrestled down to only killing a fourth of the US troops killed in a month. It used to be more.
In mid-July, There were about 100 violent attacks in a single week in al-Anbar.
That's a bright spot. That's progress. Since the year before, there were 400 violent attacks in that same period.
Well, yes, that's a relative improvement. But a hundred violent attacks in a week? That's being touted as good news to be ecstatic over? There were probably on the order of 1100 attacks that week in all of Iraq. So al-Anbar generated nearly one-tenth of all attacks. But it is only 1/24 of Iraq by population, so it is more than twice as dangerous with regard to the number of attacks than you would expect from its small population."
Fallujah is another story. IPS quotes a local Sunni cleric "To say Fallujah is quiet is true, and you can see it in the city streets," said Shiek Salim from the Fallujah Scholars' Council. "The city is practically dead, and the dead are quiet."
The truth is that the surge isn't aiding Iraq's political reconciliation! Comptroller General David Walker, among others, realizes that the success in Anbar won't be transferable to other Iraqi areas. These same Anbar Sunnis we are arming have US blood on their hands. Doesn't W know about blow-backs? Doesn't it occur to W that these Anbar Sunnis, once they get rid of al Qaida, will return to killing US soldiers--with better equipment that we have so thoughtfully provided them with?
"Dead Certain" has only been out for a short period of time, but the few excerpts now read and understood show that W's only concern is saddling the next president with his failed Iraqi theatre of GWOT. He claims to be shedding tears for our soldiers, but if he wasn't such an infantile psychopath, he'd be redeploying our troops now! The only "Dead Certain" fact is that our soldiers and innocent Iraqis are dying while W is using their sacrificed lives as ways to gain a permanent GOP majority.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
