Ever wonder how to respond to the SURGE worked? See today's Democracy Now! with Robert Fisk.

[Union Thug]

Amy interviews acclaimed journalist, Robert Fisk, as he discusses his book, The Three Trillion Dollar War, and takes a sobering look at the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and the broader mid-east. Must see.

http://www.democracynow.org/

[Tarc]

1. The easy response is "You don't get credit for fixing your own colossal fuckups"

If a guy digs himself into a hole, you don't praise him for eventually crawling back to the surface.

[leveymg]

2. "The Surge" is a nice term for "Declare Victory and Get the Hell Out of Iraq"

Wars of occupation, such as the invasion of Iraq that started in 2003, are won or lost in terms of politics, the winning of Hearts and Minds, not battlefield victories. Take Vietnam, for instance. In political terms, America lost the Iraq War on April 28, 2004, the day the Abu Ghraib torture photos were first published in The New Yorker. Curiously, these were leaked from within by U.S. Army intelligence, which indicates a sort of mutiny that goes unacknowledged by most of the American political class.

From the very beginning, the military brass was skeptical about the pretext for this war, and after the May 2003 preliminary report of the CIA Iraq Survey Group showed that there were, indeed, no WMDs in Iraq, the most able top officers quit in disgust and decamped back to Washington.

You can't win a war when your generals have mutinied. Everything that follows is just damage control.

The only real winner of this war were the Kurds and Iran. The Saudi Royals, who have been underwriting most of the Iraqi insurgency, probably will be hard-pressed to survive an internal uprising fueled by the anger of the Iraqi Sunnis they will soon abandon. The Pakistani military and ISI are already in the opposition camp. Riyadh has, perhaps, three years, unless the Saudis agree to sit down in good faith to a comprehensive regional settlement.

The Surge happened because the Saudis refused to deal with reality. We're not going to save them from their own bad judgment, again.